Reclusive Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger dies

LEGENDARY author JD Salinger whose novel, The Catcher in the Rye, shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died at the age of 91.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home, the author’s son said in a statement from the authors literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, New Hampshire.

The Catcher in the Rye, with its immortal teenage protagonist, the rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made Catcher a featured selection, advised that for “anyone who has ever brought up a son” the novel will be “a source of wonder and delight – and concern”.

Enraged by all the “phonies” who make “me so depressed I go crazy,” Holden soon became American literature’s most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel’s sales are astonishing – more than 60 million copies worldwide – and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams – to never grow up.

Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel’s themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. Catcher presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that intensified with the oncoming generation gap.

By the 21st century, Holden seemed relatively mild, but Salinger’s book remained a standard in school curriculums and was discussed on countless websites and became a fan page on Facebook.

Salinger’s other books don’t equal the influence or sales of Catcher, but they are still read, again and again, with great affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.

The collection Nine Stories features the classic A Perfect Day for Bananafish, the deadpan account of a suicidal army veteran and the little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel Franny and Zooey, like Catcher, is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.

The Catcher in the Rye became both required and restricted reading, periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden’s shoulder.

Salinger also wrote the novels Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour – An Introduction, both featuring the neurotic, fictional Glass family which appeared in much of his work. His last published story, Hapworth 16, 1928, ran in The New Yorker in 1965. By then he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable.

“Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school,” Norman Mailer once commented.

In 1997, it was announced that Hapworth would be reissued as a book – prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical Salinger style, didn’t appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbour Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.

“I love to write and I assure you I write regularly,” Salinger said in a rare brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La) Advocate in 1980. “But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.”