Salinger Dies, "People Never Notice Anything

What makes a book immortal? Is it as simple as one character? Is there a formula, or is an element of je ne sais quoi necessary to chisel a title in stone? Whatever the answer, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is among the chosen few. Comfortable in its place among the stars, Catcher sells around 250,000 copies a year, now a half-century and change after its publication. Jerome David Salinger passed away this January, in the 91st year of a life both rewarding and difficult, glamorous and reclusive. Salinger's discreet transition from his Cornish, N.H. home left the spotlight on his works.

Salinger was born in 1919 in Manhattan, N.Y. Born to a Jewish father and a Scottish-Irish mother, he attended both public and private schools in the city that would become the stomping ground of one of the most famed protagonists of his time. As a young student, Salinger took an interest in acting as a means of creative expression, but it wasn't until dropping out of New York University and an unsuccessful foray into the meat packing industry that Salinger took his first writing course: a night class at Columbia University. 1941 brought seven rejections of his short stories from The New York Times. His luck turned around later that year when the The New Yorker accepted Slight Rebellion off Madison, a New York City based short revolving around none other than our favorite discontented teenager, Holden Caulfield. In 1942, Salinger was drafted. He fought at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge. His return from the war preceded two years of rejections from The New Yorker. Little did the disjointed writer know that the creation he'd left behind in Holden would be the seed of his national stardom nine years later.

Salinger's opus, The Catcher in the Rye, was met with mixed reviews upon its first publication, though the city to which the book owed inspiration received it with open arms from the get-go. Franny and Zooey and Hapworth 16, 1924 garnered attention, though nothing compared with the torrent of his initial endeavor.

Much like Holden, Salinger's life was riddled with confusion, eccentricities, and frequent changes. A complicated spiritual life began with strict adherence to the doctrines of Zen Buddhism. This first philosophy led to an interest in Kriya Yoga, which Salinger performed with his wife Claire two times a day. Yoga was soon traded for Scientology, a short-lived phase, before exploring Christian Science in the form of homeopathy, acupuncture, and macrobiotics. These many transitions lent to the alienation from society that he would ultimately embrace.

J.D. Salinger was an avid writer, reader, and thinker, hailing allegiance to talented writers from Kafka to Austen. He was a complicated individual with a fluctuating sense of identity and a turbulent family life. His rare combination of pliability and inflexibility bestowed him with a unique gift for expression, at once disinterested and overly sensitive. Salinger's reclusiveness and unwillingness to peddle Catcher in the Rye to interested filmmakers has preserved the integrity of both the author and his protagonist. The literary world lost one of its most influential members this January, but we're grateful that he's preserved himself so artfully in a work that wont fade into irrelevancy for a long time to come.