J D Salinger

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City, 1919. Salinger was the youngest of two children born to Sol Salinger, the son of a rabbi who ran a thriving cheese and ham import business, and Miriam, Sol's Scottish-born wife. Despite his apparent intellect, Salinger wasn't much of a student. After flunking out of the McBurney School near his home in New York's Upper West Side, he was shipped off by his parents to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. He dropped out from college, but he attended an evening course in Columbia University where he started to write and publish short stories. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the army, serving from 1942-'44. His short military career saw him land at Utah Beach in France during the Normandy Invasion and be a part of the action at the Battle of the Bulge. During this time, however, Salinger continued to write, assembling chapters for a new novel whose main character was a deeply unsatisfied young man named Holden Caulfield. Salinger did not escape the war without some trauma, and when it ended he was hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown. When Salinger returned to New York in 1946, he quickly set about resuming his life as a writer and soon found his work published in his favorite magazine, The New Yorker. He also continued to push on with the work on his novel. Finally, in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was published. In 1953, two years after the publication of Catcher, Salinger pulled up stakes in New York City and retreated to a secluded, 90-acre place in Cornish, New Hampshire. There, Salinger did his best to cut-off contact with the public and significantly slowed his literary output. Two collections of his work, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters were published in book form in the early 1960s. He led a very private life from then on. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980.