Salinger was born in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, New York to a prosperous Jewish importer of kosher cheese and his Scottish-Irish wife on January 1, 1919. His lived with his father, mother, and two sisters in a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue. As a youth Salinger was very standoffish, not to a great degree, but it was noticeable and commented on. When called upon to be social, he could appear to be warm and engaging. He had no problem being the center of attention when amusing his classmates with well-told stories and jokes, but when it was time to go hang out, he usually stayed behind.

Salinger had early, inner conflicts c

After the War, Salinger devoted himself to writing. He established his reputation on the publication of his first and only novel to date, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a coming of age tale based on the growing pains of central character, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield. He has also published 35 short stories including A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1963), which first appeared in The New Yorker and introduced readers to Seymour Glass, a character who appeared in Franny and Zooey (1961) Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (both 1963) and who eventually committed suicide. Other short stories that the author has chosen to publish are collected in Nine Stories (1953). Two of his early works (“I’m crazy” and “Slight Rebellion of Madison”) are in fact early versions of some of the episodes in Catcher, and reveal Salinger in process or discovering him major themes and experimenting with what where to develop into his most effective techniques.

The Catcher in the Rye is a deceptively simple, enormously rich book whose sources of appeal run in deep and are completely phony and worthless; the book thus becomes a handbook for rebels and a guide to the failures of society. The older generations are likely to view Holden as a bright, but sick boy whose psyche needs adjustment before he can settle down into his place in society. The younger generations could view him as a ideal rebel or as a neurotic misfit. The novelist William Maxwell reports that Salinger works “with infinite labor, infinite patience, and in

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