J.D Salinger dies. . . !

Hi Friends & fellow bloggers:

I love a great story and will tell one from time to time. Telling a great story is an art and when you hear a tale that's fascinating you seldom care if the story is indeed factual. Sometimes, truth and fiction is a line that's blurred in a fog of intrigue. As for most of my of my stories over the years, a fog of humor!

When author J.D. Salinger died this week I was immediately brought back to the days of my youth when his book, "The Catcher in the Rye" published in 1951, was a must read, and still is today. I read it and loved it. I still have the book as I never returned it to the school library. The late fee must be ten thousand dollars by now. (See what I mean about truth and a good story.)

The book was an incredible story of a rebel youth, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school and his anti establishment views and attitude ring loud and clear. Reading it was a youthful right of passage, almost like getting your learners permit, but what's even more amazing and intriguing is J.D. Salinger's life after he wrote the book. He was a complete recluse. Living, or hiding, in a self inflicted way for more than 50 years in a little shack in a small town in New Hampshire. Wow! He was 91 years old. Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. Very Garbo'esque!

Mark David Chapman, the killer of John Lennon in 1980, said the reason for killing Lennon could be found in passages in "The Catcher in the Rye."

Salinger wrote a couple more short stories that received less critical acclaim and in 1954 he moved to a little 90 acre compound in New Hampshire and stayed there for the rest of his life. He emerged every once and awhile and was even married at one point and, had a son, Matthew in 1966. As the years rolled by Salinger grew more and more reclusive and at one point he even had his publisher remove his picture from the back book covers of "Catcher" and said he was "sick and tired of seeing his picture on the back cover and I don't want anyone else to see it either."

When Salinger said that he was "in this world but not of it" his friends and family really began to see a change in him which, of course, lead to even more intrigue about his whereabouts and his reclusive habits. "He was either crazy or the Manet and Tolstoy of our time," as a NY Times reporter recently said Salinger. Not understanding him is the way he wanted to be known. He didn't care for fame, celebrity or money. Just like the characters he wrote about. It is said that Salinger wrote about fictional charcters and then brought them to life by living them.

If you've never read the book, I highly recommend it. To this day "Catcher" still sells 250,000 copies a year in paperback and is published in 120 different languages.

Here's the first two sentences in the book.

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my 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. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

Jim