Confronting another in an apparently unending series of collected essays about J. D. Salinger 's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a British reviewer once asked with some asperity why nearly every American critic who wrote about the novel seemed compelled...

Best known for his controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), J. D. Salinger (born 1919) is recognized by critics and readers alike as one of the most popular and influential authors of American fiction to emerge after World War II. Salinger's...

The entire body of writing by which Jerome David Salinger wishes to be known is contained in four small books—one novel and thirteen short stories. All of these were published in the eleven and a half years between January 1948 and June 1959; and...

Artists and critics alike often complain about hip hop fans’ fickle, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately disposition. And, generally speaking, artists who spend more than a year in the lab are viewed as J.D. Salinger–style hermits or weirdo Orson Welles–ish auteurs. For that reason, Chicago’s allegiance to Twista—arguably the...

Today is Tuesday, Jan. 1, the first day of leap year 2008. There are 365 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:Two hundred years ago, on Jan. 1, 1808, a law prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States went into effect.On this...

You must be feeling pretty good about yourselves these days, ever since those Norwegian epidemiologists conferred the equivalent of intellectual primogeniture on all of you. And truth be told, we’d be feeling pretty good about ourselves too if the report had gone the other way...

Jerry Seinfeld casually refers to "the TV show" like it was just another resume entry, a vaguely familiar event from his past.Wait, wasn't that TV show "Seinfeld"? One of the greatest comedies in TV history? You know, the one with double-dippers, puffy shirts and mimbos?Seinfeld,...

In the following essay, Bidney examines the role of epiphanies in Salinger's short fiction.

This is 1979, and it has been twenty-eight years since Holden Caulfield dragged his deer-hunting cap and his prep-school heart through Manhattan. But J. D. Salinger's ideas on the true and the false in American culture, his religious solutions to the crises of alienation and isolation, and his overriding sentimentality may have had more impact on the American brainscape than anyone yet has taken into account. Since the publication of a long story, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in The New Yorker ...

In the following essay, Boe asserts that Salinger employs sport as a significant thematic device in many of his stories.

A biography of author J.D. Salinger.