60 Facts About JD Salinger

Jerome David JD Salinger was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye.

JD Salinger got his start in 1940, before serving in World War II, by publishing several short stories in Story magazine.

JD Salinger followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories ; Franny and Zooey, a volume containing a novella and a short story; and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction .

JD Salinger's mother, Marie, was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of German, Irish, and Scottish descent, "but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws" and considered herself Jewish after marrying JD Salinger's father.

JD Salinger did not learn that his mother was not of Jewish ancestry until just after he celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.

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In 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue, and JD Salinger enrolled at the McBurney School, a nearby private school.

JD Salinger had trouble fitting in there and took measures to conform, such as calling himself Jerry.

JD Salinger "showed an innate talent for drama, " though his father opposed the idea of his becoming an actor.

JD Salinger began writing stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight".

JD Salinger was the literary editor of the class yearbook, Crossed Sabres, and participated in the glee club, aviation club, French club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.

JD Salinger's Valley Forge 201 file says he was a "mediocre" student, and his recorded IQ between 111 and 115 was slightly above average.

JD Salinger started his freshman year at New York University in 1936.

JD Salinger considered studying special education but dropped out the following spring.

Surprisingly, JD Salinger went willingly, but he was so disgusted by the slaughterhouses that he firmly decided to embark on a different career.

In 1939, JD Salinger attended the Columbia University School of General Studies in Manhattan, where he took a writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine.

In 1942, JD Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill.

In late 1941, JD Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly a performer.

JD Salinger was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

JD Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona.

JD Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit known as the Ritchie Boys, in which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war.

JD Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns.

JD Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, publishing several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post.

JD Salinger lived in Weißenburg and, soon after, married Sylvia Welter.

JD Salinger brought her to the United States in April 1946, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and Sylvia returned to Germany.

JD Salinger looked at the envelope, and, without reading it, tore it apart.

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In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help JD Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint.

JD Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.

In 1947, JD Salinger submitted a short story, "The Bananafish", to The New Yorker.

The critical acclaim accorded "Bananafish" coupled with problems JD Salinger had with stories being altered by the "slicks" led him to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker.

JD Salinger published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.

JD Salinger serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own duplicity.

In letters from the 1940s, Salinger expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F Scott Fitzgerald; Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor".

JD Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life in 1952, after several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna.

JD Salinger became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family.

In 1953, JD Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker, as well as two the magazine had rejected.

Already tightening his grip on publicity, JD Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.

JD Salinger invited them to his house frequently to play records and talk about problems at school.

One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded JD Salinger to be interviewed for the high school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper.

JD Salinger was seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.

Margaret JD 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" .

JD Salinger insisted that Claire drop out of school and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, which she did.

JD Salinger's family life was further marked by discord after his first child was born; according to Margaret's book, Claire felt that her daughter had replaced her in JD Salinger's affections.

The infant Margaret was sick much of the time, but JD Salinger, having embraced Christian Science, refused to take her to a doctor.

JD Salinger built a new house for himself across the road and visited frequently.

JD Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963.

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In 1972, at age 53, JD Salinger had a relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard that lasted for nine months.

JD Salinger's had dropped out of Yale to be with him, even forgoing a scholarship.

JD Salinger's said that she had turned down several lucrative offers for the tape, the only known recording of Salinger's voice, and that she had changed her will to stipulate that it be placed along with her body in the crematorium.

JD Salinger was romantically involved with television actress Elaine Joyce for several years in the 1980s.

In May 1986 JD Salinger learned that the British writer Ian Hamilton intended to publish a biography that made extensive use of letters JD Salinger had written to other authors and friends.

The film could be distributed legally in Iran since it has no copyright relations with the United States, JD Salinger had his lawyers block a planned 1998 screening of it at Lincoln Center.

In June 2009, Salinger consulted lawyers about the forthcoming U S publication of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, by Swedish book publisher Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym J D California.

Mr JD Salinger is almost equally famous for having elevated privacy to an art form.

Margaret JD Salinger allowed that "the few men who lived through Bloody Mortain, a battle in which her father fought, were left with much to sicken them, body and soul", but she painted her father as a man immensely proud of his service record, maintaining his military haircut and service jacket, and moving about his compound in an old Jeep.

JD Salinger enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them.

Margaret offered many insights into other JD Salinger myths, including her father's supposed longtime interest in macrobiotics and involvement with alternative medicine and Eastern philosophies.

JD Salinger's widow and son began preparing this work for publication after his death, announcing in 2019 that "all of what he wrote will at some point be shared" but that it was a major undertaking and not yet ready.

JD Salinger identified closely with his characters, and used techniques such as interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue.

Contemporary critics discuss a clear progression over the course of JD Salinger's published work, as evidenced by the increasingly negative reviews each of his three post-Catcher story collections received.

JD Salinger seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control.