The 91-year-old ‘Catcher in the Rye’ author Jerome David Salinger, better known as JD Salinger, died on Wednesday in his New Hampshire home due to natural causes.
Salinger has been one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, with his literary masterpiece, ‘Catcher in the Rye’, representing the angst and misery of generations of teenage rebels in America.
However, he had never published anything after 1965 and had not appeared in any public interview since 1980. During his last decades, he had lived a reclusive life, wherein he detached himself from the public and isolated himself in his house on a hill in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Though his fans pleaded for a new literary piece, there was no indication of a new book despite the claims of his former lover and daughter in memoirs that he still wrote.
In one of his rare and last interviews in 1980, he said in the Boston Sunday Globe, “I love to write, and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself and I want to be left absolutely alone to do it.”
His last work that reached publication, the Glass family story ‘Hapworth 16: 1924’, was expected to be reprinted in 1997 after it first came out in the June 1965 edition of the New Yorker. However, the publication date was repeatedly cancelled without any explanation.
Salinger was born on 1 January 1919 in New York. His father was Polish, while his mother was an Irish.
He married Claire Douglas, who bore their children, Matt and Margaret. They separated in 1967 and he had other relationships before he died.
