J.D. Salinger
1 book analyzed
Biography
Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) was born in Manhattan to a half-Jewish, half-Irish father and a Scotch-Irish mother who converted to Judaism. He attended Valley Forge Military Academy — the model for Pencey Prep. He was writing short stories and had begun working on Holden's voice before WWII. Then the war happened. Salinger served in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps and landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He fought through France, participated in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes winter of 1944-45, and was among the first American soldiers to enter a liberated Nazi concentration camp. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for combat stress in Nuremberg. He brought the manuscript of Catcher with him through the campaign. He never publicly discussed the war in detail. After the novel's 1951 publication made him internationally famous, he moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, built a bunker-like compound, and refused all interviews, photographs, and public life for the remaining fifty-nine years of his life. He never published another novel.