J.
D. Salinger Jerome David Salinger was a very influential individual in history and he never gave up on his passion for writing. J.D. Salinger was born on January 1, 1919, in Manhattan, New York. “His mother Miriam was Christian and his father Sol Salinger was a Jewish man who ran a kosher cheese and meat import business”(Biography.
com). As Miriam started growing closer to her husband, she slowly started converting to the Jewish religion. Jerome was the youngest of two kids and wasn’t the brightest kid when it came to getting good grades in school.
He overcame many challenges in his life, but it took time. J.D. Salinger is famous today because of his determination to keep his audience for the books he wrote while being interrupted by school, World War II, and many companions. When Salinger went to school, he had a rough time because he was not the smartest student. He later realized that he had to work hard to accomplish his goals. First, he dropped out of McBurney School in New York, and then his parents shipped him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania in 1934. Two years later, he graduated and moved to Vienna, Austria for five months to study a different language and also learn about meat processing.
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Salinger gained confidence and had a new approach to life after living in Austria so he went back to school in 1938 at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. In the same year, he went back to New York and met Whit Burnett who changed his life forever. Burnett helped J.D. publish many things because he noticed how talented Salinger was through the stories he wrote. His career had started to take off when he published many books with the help and push of Burnett.
His career in writing had started to take off, but then World War II interrupted his life just like most young men around this time. “After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the army, serving from 1942-1944″(Fiene, Donald M.). During his short military career, he was stationed at Utah Beach in France during the Normandy Invasion and was a big part of the action at the Battle of the Bulge. During this time, Salinger continued to write about different topics that struck his mind. Salinger escaped the war but he suffered from some post-war trauma, and when the war totally ended he was hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown. After getting over some of the war trauma, he met a woman named Sylvia, a German, and possibly a former Nazi. They got married but their relationship was very short; it lasted about eight months.
He married a second time in 1955 to Claire Douglas. They were together for a little more than a decade and had two children together, Margaret and Matthew. When Salinger returned to New York in 1946, he resumed his life as a writer and continued to write The Catcher in the Rye. In 1951 The Catcher in the Rye was published. The book earned a lot of positive reviews, but some readers weren’t so kind about their review of the book.
A few readers saw the main character, Caulfield, promoting corrupt messages to the audience. Over time, The Catcher in the Rye became an important part of the worlds literature curriculum. To this day, more than 65 million copies have been sold all across the United States. Along the way, Caulfield has become just as popular as any other fictional character in history. The Catcher in the Rye boosted Salinger to a level of unmatched literary fame.
In 1953, two years after the publication of Catcher, Salinger retreated to a secluded, 90-acre place in Cornish, New Hampshire. There, Salinger did his best to cut-off contact with the outside world while writing many books. “Two collections of his work, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam were both published in book form in the early 1960s.
“(Bartelt, Kathryn) In the June 19, 1965, edition of The New Yorker, nearly the entire issue was dedicated to a new short story, “Hapworth”. “Hapworth” was the last Salinger book that was published while he was still alive. Six years later Salinger was in another relationship, with a girl named Joyce Maynard. She wrote a few stories that appeared in The New York Times Magazine and caught the interest of older writers. The two lived together in Cornish for 10 months before Salinger kicked her out.
A year later, she auctioned off a series of letters that Salinger had written to Joyce while they were still together. The letters altogether sold for around $156,500. The buyer later returned them to Salinger as a gift. For Salinger, other relationships followed his affair with Maynard.
For some time he dated the actress Ellen Joyce. Later, he married a young nurse named Colleen O’Neill. There is a ton of unpublished work that Salinger never followed through with to get published but he still continued to write through all of his life challenges. Those who knew him said he worked every day to finish his stories. “One estimate claims that there might be around 10 finished novels locked away in his house that no one knows about.”(Mcgrath, Charles) Jerome David Salinger and Colleen O’Neill were married up until his death on January 27, 2010, in Cornish.
