Dear Reader,
Creating this multi-genre research project has been somewhat bittersweet for me. The sweet has come with the fact that I am writing about one of my personal heroes- Jerome David Salinger (January 1 1919 – January 27, 2010), better known to the world as J.D. Salinger, the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye.
The bitter is knowing that Salinger would have hated what I am doing. Salinger, who retreated from the public eye and began living a notably private life in 1953, valued his privacy to put it mildly (Alexander 26). As his biographer, Paul Alexander, wrote: “Almost all writers play by the rules of the game. . .because they want to stay in the good graces of the publishers, the people who make the rules—but, in a career that has spanned over half a century, J.D. Salinger has refused to comply with even the most basic of these rules” (24).
Unlike most other writers, Salinger did not attend book signings or huge press conferences. He once taught a class at Sarah Lawrence, and that was the extent of his public appearances, literally. Salinger never sat down to an official interview. Soon after his first book was off the presses, he demanded that his photo no longer appear on the jacket. Salinger always asked his managers and agents to throw away all fan mail he received. He even went so far as to request that future editions of his books feature only his words and plain text, nothing else. Perhaps most unfortunately of all, Salinger ceased publishing his work altogether in 1965 (Alexander 24-5).
It is undeniably Salinger’s idiosyncrasies that fascinate me, and I’d venture to guess the rest of the world, almost as much as his beautiful, soul-searing writing. I wonder why he went into seclusion, what made him shy away from his fans, from the world around him. These are questions that I’ll never have complete answers to. I can, however, speculate based on my research and on who I believe Salinger to be in my heart, and that is what I’ve tried to do with this project. I’ve attempted to mingle fact and fiction, to give you a glimpse into the man that Salinger was in his early years and the writer he eventually became. We will start near the end, taking a brief glimpse at Salinger’s life as a recluse, before jumping to the beginning, when a young boy dreamed of becoming a famous writer, and piecing together the events leading up to his decision to move into a tiny house in Cornish, New Hampshire and cut off all contact from the rest of the world. I can only hope that he understands or, at the very least, would forgive me for my intrusion.
