Bibliography
Recommend a title for bookclub
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A Good Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| Franny and Zooey | 5 | |
| The Catcher in the Rye | 4 |
A Bad Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters; and Seymour, An Introduction | 2 |
J. D. Salinger
added by editor
Comments
Please consider recommending where to begin reading this author, or where not to. A few words about your experiences reading this author and why you make the recommendations you do will be helpful to other users. If you are the author or have studied this author extensively, please say so.
Well, you have to read CATCHER IN THE RYE, don't you -- to see for yourself what all the fuss is about (and to find out what the title means!). After that, I would recommend "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" from NINE STORIES, because it offers a great contrast from CATCHER. There isn't all that much in total, so if you want to read it all, pace yourself.
emac52 February 13th, 2007 07:30 AM PST
One of those 'MUST READ' books, The Catcher In The Rye, although brilliant when first encountered as a teenager, has, for me at least, lost a little when revisited as an adult. Rather than feeling any rapport with Holden Caulfield, instead, I wanted to yell at him to 'snap out of it' and to 'grow up'. That said, I still think that you have to experience it, preferably before you finish high school, so that you too can ponder where the ducks go in winter!
imogen October 20th, 2008 05:38 PM PST
Outside the US, Nine Stories often published as For Esme with Love and Squalor
Biography
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Boiled down from the Wikipedia entry on Salinger:
Salinger was born in New York City to a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. He attended Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, upon which Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye is based. Began writing in college. He served in the Army during World War II, where he saw combat action with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division in some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
y 1948, with the publication of a critically-acclaimed short story entitled A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Salinger began to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker, a magazine he greatly admired. Many of his best-known works first appeared in some form in The New Yorker.
The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, and made Salinger famous. The novel was banned in some countries because of its bold and offensive use of language; it is still widely read.
After the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger tried to escape public exposure and attention as much as possible. Though he hasn't published anything in the past 30 years, he constantly struggles with the unwanted attention he gets as a cult figure. Widely varied accounts of his personality and habits have appeared in books by his daughter, a former lover, and others; some describe a traumatized veteran recluse, others an outgoing traveler and "bon vivant." He refuses to license film versions of his work. It has been reported that he has numerous novels in storage, for publication after his death.
Marian March 11th, 2006 08:41 PM PST