Among other accomplishments, he takes part in the Battle of the Bulge and, later, enters Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau. He also forges a strong friendship with war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. Salinger continues his writing career during the war, carting his typewriter around in his Jeep. His experiences in the war leave a deep impression on him and prove to be the transformative trauma of his life and career.
His writing is changed forever. They live together only eight months, and the marriage officially ends when Salinger files for an annulment. The story causes a sensation. Salinger signs a contract with the magazine, promising to let them have first opportunity at publishing any of his future stories. The movie is ripped apart by critics.
Salinger finds the experience so miserable that he never formally authorizes another film version of his work. He begins the process of retreating from public life. His interest in religion spans his adult life, and he also dabbles in Christian Science and Dianetics, the precursor to Scientology.
Although Salinger had resented being sent away during his childhood — he particularly detested his time at the Valley Forge Military Academy — he was unsympathetic when his daughter rang from her boarding school to plead for help when she was ill and lonely. Salinger cut her short and instead sent her a subscription to The Christian Science Journal.
Her book also details some of his weirder traits, including his belief in the therapeutic powers of his energy-capturing orgone box, his obsession with homeopathy and a fad he went through of drinking his own urine. After eight months, she was unceremoniously dumped.
Maynard, who is now 65, said in an interview in September that she had been vilified for her revelations. She said she hoped the MeToo movement would allow her story to be seen in a different light.
His second wife Claire also declined to write a book about her life with Salinger and his interest in strange philosophies, including one that suggested that women were impure.
His obsessions took a toll on Claire, who divorced him in After that, we lost touch. A better image of Salinger comes through the 50 letters and four postcards he sent to Londoner Donald Hartog from to Salinger met Hartog in , when they were both 18 and studying German in Vienna, and they remained lifelong friends.
Salinger wrote to his friend describing his life in more everyday terms. He also liked to relax by watching Marx Brothers and Alfred Hitchcock films and doing crossword puzzles. Salinger never spoke publicly about politics, but in this correspondence, he offered his private opinions of legislators. They remained together for the final 22 years of his life, as he grew older, more infirm and very deaf. Salinger refused to wear a hearing aid and at the Railway Station restaurant where he ate regularly.
A waitress recalled that she used to have to write down instructions on a dry-wipe board he carried with him. The paranoia about unwanted visitors can only have increased after the events of The Catcher in the Rye had become the bible of alienation for a generation of disaffected teenagers and in December its vast popular appeal was shown to bring its own problems.
An immediate best-seller, the success of The Catcher in the Rye, however, did not persuade Salinger to publish another novel.
He was the youngest son of a rabbi, Sol Salinger and Miriam. Salinger published a story for the first time at the age of 21 when he met and befriended Whit Burnett who was the founder and editor of the Story Magazine at Columbia University. It was during this time that Salinger started working on his masterpiece, giving birth to the legendry character of Holden Caulfield. The trauma from the war resulted in a nervous breakdown after which Salinger was hospitalized. Scott Berg referred to it as a "bastardization.
When Brigitte Bardot wanted to buy the rights to "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Salinger refused the request, but told his friend, Lillian Ross, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, "She's a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I'm tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport. In the s, Salinger confided to several people that he was working on a novel featuring Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist of his short story "Slight Rebellion off Madison," and The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, The novel's plot is simple, detailing sixteen-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City following his expulsion, and departure, from an elite prep school.
The book is more notable for the iconic persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden. He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own duplicity. In a interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical, explaining that "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book The novel was a popular success; within two months of its publication, The Catcher in the Rye had been reprinted eight times.
It spent thirty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. The book's initial success was followed by a brief lull in popularity, but by the late s, according to Ian Hamilton, it had "become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed.
In the s, several U. In one book-length study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye "had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools," after John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. The book remains widely read; as of , the novel was selling about , copies per year, "with total worldwide sales over 65 million".
In the wake of its s success, Salinger received and rejected numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn. Since its publication, there has been sustained interest in the novel among filmmakers, with Billy Wilder, Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg among those seeking to secure the rights. Salinger stated in the s that "Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden.
Salinger responded: "A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves.
I won't name any living writers. I don't think it's right. Scott Fitzgerald; Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor. After several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, in , while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna, Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life. He became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family.
Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story "Teddy" features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights. He also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in the story "Hapworth 16, ," the character of Seymour Glass describes him as "one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century.
In , Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker "Bananafish" among them , as well as two that the magazine had rejected. The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—"remarkably so for a volume of short stories," according to Hamilton. Already tightening his grip on publicity, though, Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.
As the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. Early in his time at Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with students at Windsor High School.
Salinger invited them to his house frequently to play records and talk about problems at school. One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for the high school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper. However, after Blaney's interview appeared prominently in the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off all contact with the high schoolers without explanation.
He was also seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity. They had two children, Margaret b. December 10, and Matthew b. February 13, Margaret Salinger wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that she believes her parents would not have married, nor would she have been born, had her father not read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the "householder" a married person with children.
After their marriage, J. They received a mantra and breathing exercises to practice for ten minutes twice a day. Salinger also insisted that Claire drop out of school and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, which she did. Certain elements of the story "Franny", published in January , are based on his relationship with Claire, including her ownership of the book The Way of the Pilgrim.
Because of their isolated location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Claire was also frustrated by Salinger's ever-changing religious beliefs. Though she committed herself to Kriya yoga, she remembered that Salinger would chronically leave Cornish to work on a story "for several weeks only to return with the piece he was supposed to be finishing all undone or destroyed and some new 'ism' we had to follow.
After abandoning Kriya yoga, Salinger tried Dianetics the forerunner of Scientology , even meeting its founder L. Ron Hubbard, but according to Claire he was quickly disenchanted with it. This was followed by adherence to a number of spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems including Christian Science, homeopathy, acupuncture, macrobiotics, the teachings of Edgar Cayce, fasting, vomiting to remove impurities, megadoses of Vitamin C, urine therapy, "speaking in tongues" or Charismatic glossolalia , and sitting in a Reichian "orgone box" to bathe in "orgone energy.
Salinger's family life was further marked by discord after the first child was born; according to Margaret, Claire felt that her daughter had replaced her in Salinger's affections. The infant Margaret was sick much of the time, but Salinger, having embraced the tenets of Christian Science, refused to take her to a doctor.
According to Margaret, her mother admitted to her years later that she went "over the edge" in the winter of and had made plans to murder her month-old infant and then commit suicide. Claire had intended to do it during a trip to New York City with Salinger, but she instead acted on a sudden impulse to take Margaret from the hotel and run away.
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