1. Jerome David Salinger
“'Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.”
American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. He has not published an original work since 1965 and has not been interviewed since 1980
Raised in Manhattan, New York, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II.
In 1948 he published story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951 Salinger released his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, an immediate popular success.

2. Early life
Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York, on New Year's Day, 1919 in family of Marie Jillich and Sol Salinger. When they married, Salinger's mother changed her name to Miriam and converted to Judaism. The young Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, then moved to the private McBurney School for ninth and tenth grades. Than, he was happy to get away from his over-protective mother by entering the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania Though he had written for the school newspaper at McBurney, at Valley Forge Salinger began writing stories He entered at New York University in 1936, but dropped out the following spring,and was sent by his father to work at a company in Vienna, Austria.

3. Manhattan
The Borough of Manhattan covers the same territory and the same people as the County of New York
Manhattan is a major commercial, financial, and cultural center of the United States and to some extent the world.Most major radio, television, and telecommunications companies in the United States are based here, as well as many news, magazine, book, and other media publishers. Manhattan has many famous landmarks, tourist attractions, museums, and universities. It is also home to the headquarters of the United Nations.
The name Manhattan derives from the word Manna-hata, as written in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet

4. Debut
He left Austria only a month or so before it was annexed by Nazi Germany, on March 12, He attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, for only one semester. In 1939, Salinger attended a Columbia University. Salinger's debut short story ("The Young Folks“)was published in the magazine's March-April 1940 issue. The story satirizes the selfish concerns of a pair of young adults at a party and the festering shallowness of their lives. Burnett was the teacher of short story writing at Columbia where Salinger took his course. Salinger himself was 21 at the time of its publication.

5. World War II
In 1941, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. lettersTheir relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married. In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly as a performer The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New YorkerIn the spring of 1942, several months after the United States entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the Army, where he saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris

6. Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He was also among the first soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp Salinger's experiences in the war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and he later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.“ At the same period he wrote some stories, such as "For Esmé with Love and Squalor," which is narrated by a traumatized soldier.

7. Post-war years
After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "de-Nazification" duty in Germany. He met a woman named Sylvia, and they married in He brought her to the United States, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and Sylvia returned to Germany. In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories. In 1948, he submitted a short story titled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" to The New Yorker. . "Bananafish" was also the first of Salinger's published stories to feature the Glasses, a fictional family consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny

8. The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, The novel's plot is simple, detailing sixteen-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City following his expulsion from an elite prep school. The book is more notable for the iconic persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden. In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical, explaining that "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book.…” by the late 1950s, according to Ian Hamilton, it had "become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed."Newspapers began publishing articles about the "Catcher Cult", and the novel was banned in several countries
In the wake of its 1950s success, Salinger received (and rejected) numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen, The author has repeatedly refused, though, and in 1999, Joyce Maynard definitively concluded: "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."

9. Writing in the 1950s and move to Cornish
After several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, in 1952, while reading the gospels of Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna, Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life. He became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family. Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story "Teddy" features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights.He also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in the story "Hapworth 16, 1924", the character of Seymour Glass describes him as "one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century." In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker ("Bananafish" among them), as well as two that the magazine had rejected. The collection was published as Nine Stories in the United States, and For Esmé with Love and Squalor in the UK, after one of Salinger's best-known stories. As the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire.

10. Marriage, family
In June 1955, at the age of 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student. They had two children, Margaret (b. December 10, 1955) and Matt (b. February 13, 1960.). Certain elements of the story "Franny", published in January, 1955, are based on his relationship with Claire. Due to their isolated location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Salinger's family life was further marked by discord after the first child was born; according to Margaret, Claire felt that her daughter had replaced her in Salinger's affections. The infant Margaret was sick much of the time, but Salinger, having embraced the tenets of Christian Science, refused to take her to a doctor in the winter of 1957 and had made plans to murder her thirteen-month-old infant and then commit suicide. Claire had intended to do it during a trip to New York City with Salinger, but she instead acted on a sudden impulse to take Margaret from the hotel and run away.

11. Matthew Salinger
born February 13, 1960 in Windsor, Vermont) is an American actor, the son of author J. D. Salinger and psychologist Claire Douglas. He graduated from Phillips Andover Academy and attended Princeton University before graduating from Columbia University with a degree in art history and drama. The actor made his film debut in 1984's Revenge of the Nerds, and may be best known for his starring role in the 1990 film Captain America, based on the Marvel Comics character.
Matt married jewelry designer Betsy Becker in They live in Fairfield County, Connecticut. They have two sons, Gannon and Avery

12. Franny and Zooey
a novel by J. D. Salinger, the two parts of which were originally published as a short story and a novella, reprinted from The New Yorker in Franny and Zooey, a sister and brother both in their 20s, are the two youngest members of the Glass family.
Salinger's known interest in eastern religious philosophy such as Zen Buddhism and Hindu Advaita Vedanta are evident throughout the book, particularly in a brief section in the second chapter that includes quotations from spiritual texts. There's also a discussion of whether the book is a "mystical story" or a "love story" in the opening section of the second chapter, as speculated by the book's "narrator," Buddy Glass (who decides it's the latter). Gerald Rosen, in his short 1977 book Zen in the Art of J. D. Salinger, observes that Franny and Zooey could be interpreted as a modern Zen tale, with the main character, Franny, progressing over the course of the novel from a state of ignorance to the deep wisdom of enlightenment.

13. Last publications and Maynard relationship
Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in Each book contained two short stories or novellas, previously published in The New Yorker, about members of the Glass family. His last published work was "Hapworth 16, 1924," an epistolary novella in the form of a long letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass from summer camp.
In 1972, at the age of 53, Salinger had a year-long relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard Maynard moved in with Salinger the summer after her freshman year at Yale University. Maynard did not return to Yale that fall, and spent ten months as a guest in Salinger's Cornish home. The relationship ended, he told his daughter Margaret at a family outing, because Maynard wanted children, and he felt he was too old.

14. Joyce Maynard
Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American author. Maynard grew up in Durham, New Hampshire and attended the Oyster River School District before joining the first class at Phillips Exeter Academy. As a young woman, she wrote regularly for Seventeen magazine.
Maynard gained widespread commercial acceptance in 1992 with the publication of her novel To Die For. For many years, Maynard chose not to discuss her affair with Salinger in any of her writings, but she broke her silence in At Home In the World, a 1999 memoir. In 2006 Joyce Maynard accepted a job to teach at a writers' workshop run by the University of Southern Maine, one of the schools in the University of Maine system.
She lives and works near San Marcos (La Laguna), Guatemala part-time.

15. Legal conflicts in 1980s and 1990s
Upon learning in 1986 that the British writer Ian Hamilton intended to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life ( ), a biography including letters Salinger had written to other authors and friends, Salinger sued to stop the book's publication. The book was finally published in 1988 with the letters' contents paraphrased. The court ruled that Hamilton's extensive use of the letters went beyond the limits of fair use, and that "the author of letters is entitled to a copyright in the letters, as with any other work of literary authorship. In 1996 Salinger gave a small publisher, Orchises Press, permission to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924", the previously uncollected novella

16. Recent publicity
In 1999, twenty-five years after the end of their relationship, Joyce Maynard put up for auction a series of letters Salinger had written to her. Maynard's memoir of her life and her relationship with Salinger, At Home in the World: A Memoir, was published the same year. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,500 and announced his intention to return them to Salinger
A year later, Salinger's daughter Margaret, by his second wife Claire Douglas, published Dream Catcher: A Memoir. In her book, Ms. Salinger described the harrowing control Salinger had over her mother.A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret's brother Matt discredited the memoir in a letter to The New York Observer. He disparaged his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and stated: "I can't say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes."

17. Literary style and themes
In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote: "I almost always write about very young people", a statement which has been referred to as his credo. Salinger's language, especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was revolutionary at the time his first stories were published, and was seen by several critics as "the most distinguishing thing" about his work
Salinger identified closely with his characters, and used techniques such as interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue. Such style elements also "[gave] him the illusion of having, as it were, delivered his characters' destinies into their own keeping." Recurring themes in Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas of innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence of Hollywood and the world at large", the disconnect between teenagers and "phony" adults, and the perceptive, precocious intelligence of children.

18. List of works Books The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Nine Stories (1953)
"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948)
"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948)
"Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (1948)
"The Laughing Man" (1949)
"Down at the Dinghy" (1949)
"For Esmé with Love and Squalor" (1950)
"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" (1951)
"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" (1952)
"Teddy" (1953)
Franny and Zooey (1961)
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
"Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters" (1955)
"Seymour: An Introduction" (1959)

19. Published and anthologized stories
"Go See Eddie" (1940, republished in Fiction: Form & Experience, ed. William M. Jones, 1969)
"The Hang of It" (1941, republished in The Kit Book for Soldiers, Sailors and Marines, 1943)
"The Long Debut of Lois Taggett" (1942, republished in Stories: The Fiction of the Forties, ed. Whit Burnett, 1949)
"A Boy in France" (1945, republished in Post Stories , ed. Ben Hibbs, 1946)
"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" (1945, republished in The Armchair Esquire, ed. L. Rust Hills, 1959)
"A Girl I Knew" (1948, republished in Best American Short Stories 1949, ed. Martha Foley, 1949)
"Slight Rebellion off Madison" (1946, republished in Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, ed. David Remnick, 2000)
Published and unanthologized stories
"The Young Folks" (1940)
"The Heart of a Broken Story" (1941)
"Personal Notes of an Infantryman" (1942)
"The Varioni Brothers" (1943)
"Both Parties Concerned" (1944)
"Soft Boiled Sergeant" (1944)
"Last Day of the Last Furlough" (1944)
"Once a Week Won't Kill You" (1944)
"Elaine" (1945)
"The Stranger" (1945)
"I'm Crazy" (1945)
"A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All" (1947)
"The Inverted Forest" (1943)
"Blue Melody" (1948)
"Hapworth 16, 1924" (1964)
Unpublished and unanthologized stories
"The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" (date unknown)
"The Last and Best of the Peter Pans" (date unknown)
"Two Lonely Men" (1944)
"The Children's Echelon" (1944)
"The Magic Foxhole" (1945)