Biography EssayThe 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 ...
Read more
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 Ameri...
Read more
J. D. Salinger remains well known for a single novel: The Catcher in the Rye, which was hailed as "brilliant" upon its publication in 1951. While several of the short short stories Salinger also wrote...
Read more
J. D. Salinger was born on January 1, 1919, the second child and only son of a Jewish father, a prosperous importer of hams and cheeses and a Scotch-Irish mother. Very little is known about Salinger. ...
Read more
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-h...
Read more
A few writers are so enveloped in their reputations that their work is virtually impossible to read without being distracted by their fame and their relation to the public. No one else has ever been k...
Read more
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 Ameri...
Read more
In the following essay, Boe asserts that Salinger employs sport as a significant thematic device in many of his stories.
O Chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the ...
Read more
In the following essay, Bidney examines the role of epiphanies in Salinger's short fiction.
Strangely, no attempt has yet been made to find a pattern that can unite the epiphanies of characters...
Read more
Critical Essay by Robert M. Browne
I'm for critical ingenuity and latitude of interpretation and all, but there is some stuff up with which I will not put. Like Mr. John Hermann's view o...
Read more
Critical Essay by Joan Didion
Among the reasonably literate young and young in heart, [J. D. Salinger] is surely the most read and reread writer in America today, exerting a power over his readers whi...
Read more
Critical Essay by Leslie Fiedler
I am not sure why I have liked so much less this time through a story which moved me so deeply when I first read it in The New Yorker four or five years ago. I mean, o...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Updike
Salinger's conviction that our inner lives greatly matter peculiarly qualifies him to sing of an America where, for most of us, there seems little to do but to fee...
Read more
Critical Essay by James Lundquist
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...
Read more
Critical Essay by Paul Levine
No writer of recent years has captured the New Yorker market of Connecticut emigres the way J. D. Salinger has. From the defiant Holden Caulfield to the stoic Mrs. Glass ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Dan Wakefield
It has only been in the past few years … that professional literary critics have taken Salinger under their microscopes for examination. Even this belated inspec...
Read more
Critical Essay by Arthur Mizener
The essential reality for [Salinger] subsists in personal relations, when people, however agonizingly, love one another. "I say," remarks Buddy Glass as ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Michael Walzer
Young people today have no spokesmen. (p. 156)
Ideology, heroism, success: none of these seems sufficiently compelling. For the young today, the importance and excitem...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Hermann
Salinger's story, "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor," has been anthologized, selected as his best story, and in general accorded the hig...
Read more
J.D. Salinger: The Man Behind the Novel
Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 in New York, New York. Salinger was the only son of Sol Salinger and Marie Salinger. He had an older sister ...
Read more