Everyone on Twitter saying that J.D. Salinger passed away at age 91. No links yet available.
Edit: confirmed by AP: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBIT_SALINGER?SITE=TXKER&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-01-28-13-03-53
Wow.
It’s a sad day for banana fish. I always held out hope he would publish again.
No disrespect to him or his family, but we’ll finally know what he did leave behind… will there be a vault of manuscripts? Or even a single one?
I’m sorry for his family’s loss, but here’s hoping all of the books he supposedly wrote are finally going to come out. I have a certain kind of respect for the career he had: he made his money from Catcher and then spent about 60 years writing for himself and not bothering to publish it. If he wrote as much as some people who knew him say he did, his passing could be a huge event for literature. Of course it could also be a big disappointment. Maybe everything they said was… what’s another word for false? 
MSNBC.com has the story has a breaking news headline at the moment.
“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
Well, this is embarrassing. The obit says Catcher in the Rye is narrated from a mental facility, which I don’t remember at all.
It’s very obliquely mentioned at the very beginning (IIRC) and the very end.
Or it could be incredibly self-indulgent and turgid.
“Leave them wanting more” is always a good time to exit.
In my teens, I read Catcher probably seven times or more, thinking it was written just for me. I am sure now that many others thought the same.
Back then, I always hoped it would be made into a film. Now, I think I would dread seeing a filmed version of “Catcher In The Rye”.
Aside from casting problems, and which director, etc. you would have the problem of era - would you film it from the perspective of when it was written, or would you try to update it for today? No matter what you did, you would ruin it for many readers; older fans who read it when it first came out; fans who read it in the 60’s who identified with it on a different level in that timef rame; fans since then who have read the book in the classroom with instructors who also grew up reading the book. There are just so many levels of appreciation for the book, I would seriously doubt any film could do justice to a book so many have embedded into their mind.
J.D. may have become an insane nutcase later in life, depending on the validity of reports of those who knew him, but his self-imposed isolation has solidified the message of his one great book. Holden’s story, like J.D.'s story, is frozen in time.
A part of me hopes that the family destroys any other manuscripts locked away in vaults, although another part of me is curious to see what else he had written.
I always thought he was a big phony.
The first thing the cable news stations should talk about is where he was born and what his lousy childhood was like, and how his parents were occupied and all before they had him, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.
Oh, sad.
It is a blessing to encounter Salinger’s work at the appropriate time in one’s life to appreciate it, and I’m glad that’s the way it happened for me. Years later, I can see how it would come across very differently.
For Esme with Love and Squalor will always be a sentimental favorite.
Salinger vehemently believed that the book was unfilmable and that, in particular, the character of Holden Caulfield was “unactable.”
So much of the book is that narrative voice of Caulfield, that doing a third person narrative would lose too much (or have to be done practically all in voiceover), and nobody could really play Caulfield anyway. He’s too internal.
Now we get to debunk (or confirm???) the conspiracy theory that JD Salinger is really Thomas Pynchon, the modern-day equivalent of “Shakespeare was really Bacon/Earl of Oxford/a woman/Lope de Vega.”
Actually, though, with Salinger gone, the odds of Catcher in the Rye becoming a movie will probably go way up. Salinger adamantly refused to sell the rights for any amount of money, but his relatives might not be so principled.
All work and no play makes Jerome a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jerome a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jerome a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jerome a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jerome a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jerome a dull boy. All work and no play…
Me too. I always thought he was in the sanitorium for TB.
Did that book he sued to get banned from publishing in the US ever get published anywhere else? Anyone read it?
It’s called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye
I never read Catcher in the Rye and I’m probably too old for it now (I probably wouldn’t have sympathized with Holden all that much – he sounds like a real whiner). But “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is one of the best 20th century literary short story ever written.
Sorry to hear Salinger is gone, but it would be interesting to see what he’s done over the past 30+ years (he supposedly said he was spending the time writing, so there should be something).