J D Salinger

You know just because he is dead, it doesn't mean his book disappear.

The one that killed John Lennon urged everyone to read it. That was one reason I held back.

One endorsement makes you for go reading something millions have given much aclaim to?

I had to rethink my crush on Jodie Foster, too ed.

it's a good book...

A Separate Peace was a much better book along the same lines.

I read it, but it was quite depressing. It was banned in many Virginia public schools. JD Salinger broke the rules and I'm sorry that he is gone.

I once asked my students to put their heads on the desks. Then I asked them to raise their hands if they had ever thought of suicide. I was stunned to see that about 90% of the class did so.

I thought that Holden Caufield had done himself in, but I just checked out the summary, and found that it wasn't spelled out in so many terms.

I read a few Salinger books in a row back in my early twenties. Based on this obituary quote, I might like to read Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories again.

quoting Charles McGrath -
"Many critics admired even more “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape later writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it), and for the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story " the old structure of beginning, middle, end " in favor of an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.”

Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony " of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The Times in 1963: “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”
link - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html?hp

Edgar, will you be inspired to read if I tell you it's one of our most banned books? I'm not a huge fan of the book, but it is a piece of Americana and worth reading once. I liked Franny and Zooey better.

Several times over the years I have had dreams of catching children in the rye and keeping them from propelling themselves off cliffs, but I always wrote it off as having consumed too much alcohol and cheap hamburgers before retiring.

That explains Y he was able to die in peace
instead of getting assassinated.

David, when did you start speaking softly?

We were talking one night about zen and how it would be difficult to find anyone in the West who understood it. I said "All I know is Salinger and I don't think he knew."
Then I went and got 'Seymour' (he sees more?) and read this to the people in the corner of Thee Coffe House:
======
Zooey is playing marbles with some friends, his brother, Seymour watches for awhile then speaks:

"Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble " Ira's marble " won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it."

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Joe(All of his stories about the Glass Family were better than Catcher in the Rye.)Nation

In 1967 I took a pillow from the sofa that was in the apartment I shared with LLoyd Boyd. After empting it of the shredded kapok stuffing, I refilled it with Post Corn Flakes. When LLoyd came home from work that evening he laid back on the sofa and put his head on the pillow "What the ****?" he said. I answered, "I't nothing, it's just my cerealist pillow."

looking at his bibliography i guess i've read all his work

okay, but didn't define me in any way

Didn't he refuse to publish any more material because people misused it?

Maybe the estate will release what he's been working on....

I am going to pretend that I didn't hear that.

Only if you prefer ambiguity. Catcher in the Rye seemed more direct and more honest.

I once heard someone call his daughter "banana-fish". I don't think he was very well read.

Don't worry, you didn't miss anything (IMO).