Jerome Salinger Research Paper

Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919, in New York, New York. He had an emblematic childhood growing up there in the 1920s. Salinger was the younger of two children to Sol Salinger, the son of a rabbi who ran a flourishing cheese and ham import profession, and Mariam, Sol’s Scottish-born wife. At a time when diverse marriages of this sort were viewed at with disparagement from all corners of humanity, Miriam non-Jewish circumstantial was so well concealed that it was only after his bar mitzvah at the age of 14 that Salinger learned of his mother’s heritage. Salinger wasn’t recognized for his academic excellence it wasn’t one of his priorities. He failed out from numerous prep schools until he finally graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. His had an IQ of 115, and never completed his post- secondary education.
After graduating from Valley Forge, Salinger return back to New York to attend New York University before heading off to Europe, flush with money and inspiration from his dad to study a different language and learn more about the import trade, so in 1937, Jerome moved to Austria and Poland to study his father’s profession, but he was frustrated with it and reverted to America. Upon returning home, he made additional

attempts at college, this time at a school named Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, before coming back to New York and taking evening classes at Columbia University. I think Jerome was at a low point in his life around this time. He didn’t have a clear path he wanted to follow. But upon attending Columbia University rehabilitated his life. He met a Professor by the name of Whit Burnett. Burnett wasn’t just an excited educator, he was also a publishing supervisor from Story magazine. A very influential publication that showcases short stories. Burnett saw something in Salinger. He saw the potential and talent of a great novelist in him so he helps cultivate his craft. Everything was going well for him in his livelihood, but then, like so many other American men around that time, World War II anxious his life.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, J.D was enlisted into the armed forces. He assisted from 1942-44. The war, its repulsions, and teachings would brand itself upon every piece of Salinger’s personality and reverberate through his work. As a young author he issued several magazines, including Collier’s and Story, and he started to conjure members of the Caulfield family, including the famous Holden. His short military career landed him with a company name 4th Counter Intelligence Corps (C.I.C.) detachment at the Utah Beach in France during the Normandy Invasion and would later help in the attack on Battle of the Bulge.() The experience of war help furnished his writing. Giving it a deeper meaning and maturity that it had lacked, but Salinger didn’t escape the harsh representativeness of war. It left him with some trauma and dramatic conditions that he was hospitalized for after having a nervous breakdown.
The facts about J.D. stay in the hospital are cloaked in mystery, but it is clear that while he was experiencing treatment he met a woman named Sylvia. I have read two of my sources about her with two different details on her. One said she was a German and possibly a former Nazi and the other said she was a French physician. I know this for sure that they got married. In 1946 after eight months of marriage they got divorced. In 1955, Salinger remarried to Claire Douglas; they had a daughter (Margaret) together that year. Claire was the daughter of a British art critic name Robert Langdon Douglas.() Five years later in 1960, they welcome a baby boy (Matthew) into the world. The duo was together for a little over than a decade. When J.D. returned to New York, in 1946 he swiftly got back to his life as a writer. He soon establishes his work getting it published in his beloved magazine, The New Yorker. His dream was to continue to push headlong with his novel “Catcher ” it’s very first sentence, vaguely echoing Mark Twain, struck a hasty new note in American Literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth(). When Salinger finished The Catcher in the Rye, he sent the script to Robert Giroux, at Harcourt, Brace. When Giroux expected the manuscript, he “thought it a remarkable book and considered lucky to be its editor.” He was persuaded that the novel would do well but later acknowledged that “the thought of a best-seller never crossed my mind.” Guaranteed of the book’s distinction and having already sealed the deal with a handshake, Giroux sent The Catcher in the Rye to Harcourt, Brace vice president Eugene Reynal. After Reynal studied the document, it became known very noticeable to Giroux that the publication wouldn’t recognize the oral contract. It was deceptive to Reynal didn’t appreciate the novel at all. Giroux said late, I didn’t realize what big trouble I was in until, after he’d read it, he said, ‘Is Holden Caulfield supposed to be crazy?’ He also told him he’d assumed the typescript to one of their typical editors to read. He said ‘Textbook, what has that to do with it? ‘It’s a preppie, isn’t it? The textbook editor’s account was destructive, and that was the end of that. “Those bastards,” Salinger called them after getting the news. The manuscript was shown to Little, Brown, in Boston, which snatched it up instantaneously. Salinger would withstand other blow to his campaign.
At the end of 1950, his agent distributed The Catcher in the Rye to the offices of The New Yorker’s, a gift from J.D to the magazine that had stood by him for years.

The aim was to get The New Yorker to publish the manuscript. The feedback from Gus Lobrano, the fiction editor who he was friends with and have worked closely with on projects was paired with another unnamed analyst to judge it. Neither of them like it one bit. Its characters were considered to be unbelievable and the Caulfield children too, in particular, Holden Caulfield. They wrote, “The notion that in one family there are four such extraordinary children… is not quite justifiable.” The New Yorker declined to print a single word of the

book.
The Catcher in the Rye was issued on July 16, 1951. The public impact was greater than Salinger could’ve anticipated for or perhaps could deal with. Times magazine celebrated the novel’s depth and related the author to Ring Lardner. The New York Times called Catcher “unusually brilliant.” Despite its early questions, The New Yorker found it “brilliant, funny, and “meaningful.” The less satisfactory reviews mostly came from the novel’s phonological and idiom.() Words like goddamn, phony, and fuck you come to mind. The Catcher soon appeared onto the New York Times best-seller list and would remain there for seven months. Many readers discover within the contents of The Catcher in the Rye was often life-changing. From the beginning of the novel’s first line, J.D draws the readers into the unusual, unrestricted genuineness of Holden Caulfield, whose tortuous opinions, feelings, and reminiscences colonize. The most completely stream-of- awareness familiarity yet offered by American Literature.
For Salinger writing the novel was an act of emancipation. Things in his past like the dreadful events of war reproduced in the character Holden who faced his own trials and tribulations like the death of his brother Allie. The struggle of Holden echoes the divine journey of the novelist which is a stunning thing to watch. Two years later he published Nine Stories that helped shaped writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike, and countless others. Another one of his popular volumes was Three Early Stories. He had increasingly less communication with other people. As he got more renowned he got less accessible he started to decline to do conferences, rejecting to be photographed, and even barring contract with his book correctors and literary negotiators, whom he seemingly blamed for a number of imagined mistreatments and disloyalties.
In spite of Salinger’s best efforts, not all of his life stayed private. In 1966, Claire Douglas filed for divorce, reporting that if the relationship continued it “would seriously injure and endanger her reasoning.” Six years after the divorce Salinger found another relationship. This time, it was a young college freshman by the name of Joyce Maynard. She writes a story, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” that appeared in The New York Times Magazine that caught the curiosity of the longstanding author. The two lived together for ten months before Salinger kicked her out. In 1998, Maynard wrote about her time with the author in a scandalous account that characterized him as a controlling and obsessive person. Jerome David Salinger died on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. He was ninety-one years old.