'Catcher In The Rye' Author J.D. Salinger Dies

WCCO.com ^ | 1/28/10 | AP

[ButThreeLeftsDo]

J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

[Chi-townChief]

RIP

Catcher in the Rye = Great book!!!!!

The rest of his work kind of sucked, though.

[Little Bill]

I liked Steinbeck, read most everything he wrote. Hemmingway, “The Sun Also Rises”, first and last good book.

[Borges]

What was wrong with Nine Stories? It’s his best work!

[Taft in '52]

And how many of this guy’s books would have been sold if the “Public School” establishment would not have bought them by the millions.

When I attended a public high school in the '60's, we read Homer and Shakespeare as freshmen and Dostoevskii, Orwell, Dickens and Victor Hugo as sophomores. As juniors, we read American authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Stephen Crane, Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald.

I consider myself lucky to have been exposed to great and near-great literature. It seems to have been the next generation that was assigned books like Catcher in the Rye

[Borges]

Salinger was a much better writer than Orwell. Do you think there should be a chronological cutoff date for what’s taught in schools? Fitzgerald was only 23 years older than Salinger.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Salinger, Zinn, who’s next?

And can we make requests?

[paulycy]

Grilled cheese sandwich and a malted.

[Chi-townChief]

Vaguely remember but pretty good, if I recall. I was thinking more of Franny and Zooey which I couldn’t get into at all.

[ClearCase_guy]

The central character is whiny and self-obsessed. Holden Caulfield is a rebellious, nihilistic teenager. I consider it no coincidence that the Boomer Generation that grew up with this books consisted largedly of whiny, self-obsessed, rebellious, nihilistic people who never matured and remained teenagers for the rest of their lives.

Some books elevate the reader. This one does not. It basically made it cool to be a jerk.

[NucSubs]

I was not going to comment (I was enjoying the conversation from a distance) but Salinger was NOT better than Orwell!

[Petronski]

You don't like Orwell?

Not Road to Wigan Pier or even Nineteen Eighty-four?

I found them both to be brilliant.

[Borges]

Caulfield is not a likable character. It becomes apparent the more one reads it and as one matures. The book is critical of his attitudes and the limits they impose on him.

[Borges]

Orwell’s essays are great. Orwell’s fiction (if Animal Farm and 1984 are any indication) is crude and journalistic. I can agree with the ideas in 1984 but that doesn’t make it great literary art. You can extract its ideas and dispense with the book entirely.

[GOP Poet]

What an excellent writer and an incredible inspiration he is and has been for me. May he rest in peace.

[Daffynition]

You didn't ask me, but you know how little I worry about such things. ;)

It has to be either Norman Mailer, or Tom Wolfe ...uhhhhhhhhhhhhh ...Wolfe.

[Liberty Valance]

Rest in peace.

[Petronski]

Well I didn't much care for Animal Farm, I think the spare, almost-gaunt prose in Nineteen Eighty-four establishes mood and fits well with the underlying themes of the destruction of soul and individuality--even language itself.

[Borges]

Those are great themes but the language doesn’t express them. Expressing them by ‘absence’ is a stretch and brings to mind the Imitative Fallacy (Art about soulessness and tedium doesn’t have to be soulless and tedious). That whole middle section where he finds an old history book and Orwell goes on to transcribe huge sections of it is a structural mess.

[andy58-in-nh]

I like your graphic a great deal, but I'll have to disagree with you to some extent about Tom Wolfe - Bonfire of the Vanities was awful, but The Right Stuff and Radical Chic... most decidedly were not. Normal Mailer is bad, but not as awful as Gore Vidal. Truman Capote, I was once told, is an acquired taste. I never acquired it. Likewise, John Steinbeck I adjudge a fine writer of fiction, yet I've always despised his desolate, irredeemable sense of life as well as the pathetic hopelessness of his characters.

[C19fan]

Of course I had to read this in high school. Not very impressed at the time; although looking back I did not have the maturity and experiences to appreciate it. I want to read something that will lift my mind and spirit not throw it into the gutter like this book.