The Martlet

When will J.D. Salinger publish another book? This has been a long-time personal question. Well unfortunately, on Jan. 27, that question was answered.

Salinger, author of the lit classic The Catcher in the Rye, was reported dead after notice was released by his legal representatives at Harold Ober Associates (HOA) and his son, Matthew.

Salinger was 91.

According to HOA, Salinger died peacefully and suddenly.

“Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”

That no details on how Salinger died, other than by “natural causes.” And that’s not surprising, given the famously reclusive nature of Salinger. He retired from national acclaim in 1953 to Cornish, N.H. and refused all media inquiries when people were crying out for more from the creator of Holden Caulfield, the first literary angst-ridden teenager of the 20th century.

Salinger lived quietly in Cornish, still writing occasionally, but hadn’t published since 1965. In 1980, people cried out again for Salinger — this time not in praise, but rather in revulsion as Mark Chapman named The Catcher in the Rye his inspiration for shooting John Lennon outside Lennon’s New York apartment.

That, along with The Catcher being implicated in John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and Robert John Bardo’s shooting of Rebecca Schaeffer, surely reinforced Salinger’s need for seclusion. But it also increased his book’s reputation — paradoxically making The Catcher one of the most banned books and one of the most taught books ever in the U.S.

For me, Salinger represented an author that balanced both the academic model of “Literature,” and the ability to make you want to turn the page in a way that most modernist authors couldn’t.

Though Salinger’s later life was filled with reports of continual religious conversions, writers’ block and — according to his daughter Margaret — Hemingwayesque emotional abuse of his wife Claire Douglas, people still bought his books by the thousands each year. On this point I choose to separate the art from the artist, and enjoy his work.

In America, people have taken their own way of looking at Salinger’s death. Humorist John Hodgman wrote: “I prefer to think J.D. Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive.”

I prefer that too.