J. D. Salinger

His father traded kosher cheese and imported meat, and his mother, born Marie Jillich to German, Irish and Scottish parents, changed her name to Miriam to satisfy her in-laws. Salinger did not learn she was not Jewish until after his own bar mitzvah. He washed out of one school after another — McBurney, then Valley Forge Military Academy, then New York University, then a single semester at Ursinus — and his father sent him to Vienna and Bydgoszcz to learn the family trade, which meant slaughterhouses, which he could not stand. What took, finally, was a writing class at Columbia under Whit Burnett, who put his first story into Story magazine in the spring of 1940. In 1942 he was seeing Oona O'Neill, until she took up with Charlie Chaplin.

The Catcher in the Rye came out on July 16, 1951 and did what first novels almost never do — it kept selling. As of 2004 it was still moving about 250,000 copies a year, past 10 million worldwide. Nine Stories followed in 1953. Then came the Glass family: Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963, each one longer on religion and shorter on incident than the one before. On June 19, 1965 The New Yorker printed Hapworth 16, 1924, a letter home from a seven-year-old at summer camp. Salinger was 46. He never published another word. He lived for 45 more years in Cornish, New Hampshire, writing daily by every account that reached the outside, and filing it.

He landed on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944 with the 12th Infantry Regiment and stayed in the line through the Hurtgen Forest and the Ardennes — five campaigns, and a counter-intelligence job that meant interrogating prisoners in their own language. In April 1945 he walked into Kaufering IV, a subcamp of Dachau. He told his daughter, years later, that you never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely. When Germany surrendered he committed himself to a civilian hospital in Nuremberg for combat stress rather than a military one, which kept it off his record. He married a German woman named Sylvia Welter during the denazification work that followed, and the marriage lasted eight months. In 1953 he moved to New Hampshire and began the long business of not being available.

He spent his last decades defending the perimeter. In 1987 he stopped Ian Hamilton's biography in court, and Salinger v. Random House narrowed what biographers may quote from unpublished letters. The people close to him wrote anyway. Joyce Maynard, who moved in at 18 in 1972 while he was 53, auctioned his letters and published a memoir in 1999, and has since said she was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed her life. His daughter Margaret published Dream Catcher in 2000, over her brother Matt's objections. He died at Cornish on January 27, 2010, at 91. His widow and son say everything he wrote will be published. Sixteen years on, none of it has.

J. D. Salinger's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Young Folks article
  His first published story, in Story magazine, out of Whit Burnett's Columbia class 1940
• The Catcher in the Rye book
  Published July 16, 1951 — still selling about 250,000 copies a year half a century later 1951
• Nine Stories book
  The collection that introduced the Glass family 1953
• Franny and Zooey book
  Two New Yorker pieces bound together 1961
• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction book
  His last book 1963
• Hapworth 16, 1924 article
  The New Yorker, June 19, 1965 — the last thing he allowed into print 1965

• 1940 aged ~21 Story magazine prints The Young Folks He had written it for Whit Burnett's class at Columbia.
• June 6, 1944 aged 25 Lands on Utah Beach with the 12th Infantry Regiment
• April 1945 aged 26 Enters Kaufering IV, a subcamp of Dachau
• 1945 aged ~26 Commits himself to a civilian hospital in Nuremberg for combat stress Choosing a civilian hospital kept it off his service record.
• July 16, 1951 aged 32 The Catcher in the Rye is published
• 1953 aged ~34 Moves to Cornish, New Hampshire
• June 19, 1965 aged 46 The New Yorker prints Hapworth 16, 1924 He was 46, and he never published again.
• 1987 aged ~68 Salinger v. Random House blocks Ian Hamilton's biography The ruling narrowed what biographers may quote from unpublished letters.
• January 27, 2010 aged 91 Dies at Cornish at 91

• Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose spare prose style defined 20th-century American fiction. sought him out in Paris in 1944
• Charlie Chaplin 1889–1977
  British-American actor and filmmaker whose Tramp character became an icon of the silent film era. took Oona O'Neill from him
• Harper Lee 1926–2016
  Author of To Kill a Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that shaped America's conversation on race. the other great American disappearance
• John Updike 1932–2009
  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose Rabbit series chronicled the anxieties of suburban American men. reviewed the Glass stories against him
• Kurt Vonnegut 1922–2007
  Satirical novelist whose Slaughterhouse-Five became an anti-war classic of 20th-century literature. fellow infantryman turned novelist