RIP JD Salinger

[HopeOverFear]

breaking news JD Salinger just died he was 91.

[superduperfarleft]

1. Oh goddammit.

First Zinn, now Salinger. What a shitty day.

[avaistheone1]

2. Sad, sad day.

[xchrom]

3. May Peace be with his family and friends. Nt

[jobycom]

4. Ah damn! That one hit me in the gut.

:cry:

[Jamastiene]

5. RIP

[pleah]

6. Damn. RIP

[tonysam]

7. He was quite a character.

The Catcher in the Rye was my favorite book when I was in high school. I had read it many, many times, but I haven't read it in many years, so I don't know how I would feel about it now.

Of course he was a little odd. He had an infamous affair with writer Joyce Maynard when she was still in her teens in he was in his fifties. It ended badly, and she sold his letters years later, which were bought by someone and returned to Salinger.

[Quantess]

13. Catcher in the Rye was original teen angst.

Young people and teenagers today may not be as impressed as previous generations, because angst and slackerism are so common these days.

Is that true that she sold his letters to her? I don't know the situation, but that sounds very vengeful of her.

[Fire1]

17. Yep! Loved the cussing! lol!! n/t

[tonysam]

22. Yep, she did.

From Time:

Salinger's marriage to Claire was also over by 1967, though they continued to live very near one another so they could share in the upbringing of their two children, Margaret, who would publish a not entirely flattering memoir about her father in 2000, and Matthew, who became an actor and producer. Salinger would remain a recluse but he was never inclined to be a hermit. Within a few years of his divorce he had enticed another young woman to join him in exile. In April 1972, the New York Times Magazine published what would be a much discussed article, "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life". The author was a high school senior named Joyce Maynard. The piece brought Maynard a lot of fan mail, including an admiring letter from 53-year-old "Jerry" Salinger. A long correspondence followed, during her first year at Yale, with the tone on his end evolving from fatherly to something more romantic. At the end of her freshman year Maynard dropped out of Yale, which meant losing her scholarship, to move in with Salinger in Cornish.

Twenty-five years later she wrote about their relationship in a memoir, "At Home in the World," the only detailed picture we have of Salinger in later life. She was prompted to go public, she said, by the discovery that he had carried on the same kind of intimate correspondences with other young women, whom he then dropped just as he did her. One year after her book was published Maynard also put 15 of his letters to her up for auction. They were bought for $156,500 by the software entrepreneur Peter Norton, who returned them to Salinger.

link

[flyarm]

8. RIP ..so sad..The Catcher in the Rye ..one of the Best books from an author from this country!

[tonysam]

9. Obituary

Time

[Greybnk48]

10. Mr. Greybnk48 and I just reread Catcher in the Rye in December.

We had both read it so long ago we needed a refresher. RIP.

[malaise]

15. One of my favorite books

I'll reread it as a tribute to JD. I don't know which book I found more shocking as a teenager - this or Lady Chatterley's Lover.

[Cyrano]

11. "For Esme, with Love and Squalor"

There's a book of Salinger's nine short stories.

One of them is titled, "For Esme, with Love and Squalor."

Shakespeare wrote that "... brevity is the soul of wit." And Salinger, in this one short story, demonstrates that brevity is not only "the soul of wit," but that there are brief stories that can touch your heart and stay in your mind for your entire life.

[Joe Fields]

12. One weird mf'er

[bvar22]

14. Good Bye, JD Salinger.

Some interesting stuff from the Obit:

"...The picture of Salinger Maynard draws for us is a man preoccupied by homeopathic medicine who has a diet regimen built around vegetables and ground lamb cooked at very low temperatures. He loves certain TV programs — The Andy Griffith Show, The Lawrence Welk Show — and has reels of old Hollywood movies that he projects at home. He writes every day, but the unpublished work is stored away in a large safe that occupies a good part of one bedroom."

<snip>

"A long time ago Salinger called things off with the entire world. As keepsakes he left us those four little books. And maybe, depending on his last wishes, some of those unpublished manuscripts will find their way into print."

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957492-3,00.html

I remember the story of Salinger having a big safe that contained his unpublished works.
Perhaps we will have the opportunity to read some of it.

The rest of the obit was very interesting.

[Fire1]

16. Wow! RIP. Mr. Salinger. n/t

[lukasahero]

18. Here's to you, Mr. Salinger

"Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))."

[asdjrocky]

19. We're losing a lot of good writers in the last couple of days.

Catcher in the Rye helped turn me into a grown up, and I read it 20 years after it was published.

[Echo In Light]

20. K&R

[Cetacea]

21. K&R

[A-Schwarzenegger]

23. Never forget reading Catcher at 15 & wondering

what I would write if I ever got to where I could write so free.
Thanks, J.D.