Author J.D. Salinger 'doesn't go out of style'
By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
J.D. Salinger turned his
back on the world long before his death Wednesday in New Hampshire at age 91.
The last thing
he published was a 25,000-word short story titled "Hapworth 16, 1924"
in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.
But the
reclusive author's work, particularly The Catcher in the Rye, continues
to connect with readers.
Narrated by
Holden Caulfield, an angry prep school student who rails against
"phonies," the novel has sold more than 60 million copies since its
publication in 1951.
The Catcher in
the Rye has spent 483 weeks in the Top 150 of USA TODAY's
Best-Selling Books list, rising as high as No. 19 in July 2001, the month it
turned 50.
Only three
books have spent more weeks on the list since it was launched in October 1993.
The secret to The
Catcher in the Rye's long-lived appeal? Caulfield.
"His
voice reaches (readers) directly and immediately," says John Wenke, 57, a
professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland and author of the 1991
book J.D. Salinger:A Study of the Short Fiction. "He is unique in
20th-century literature."
Wenke has
taught The Catcher in the Rye for 30 years and says his students today
still respond to Caulfield: "He doesn't go out of style."
Salinger's
seminal novel certainly spoke to one Minnesota high school student back in
1960.
Garrison Keillor tells USA
TODAY that Salinger was "the great author of my teenage years. He was one
of those authors you felt intimately friends with and wished you could call him
up on the phone and talk, which is why, I suppose, he spent all those years in
New Hampshire not taking phone calls. There must have been millions of young people
who wanted to talk to him."
Another gauge
of Salinger's influence: He still gets people riled up.
"The
Catcher in the Rye has been a constant on our list of banned books for the
past several decades," says Deborah Caldwell Stone of the American Library Association's
Office for Intellectual Freedom. "It remains one of the most challenged
books well into the 21st century."
One of the
great literary mysteries of the last half-century is whether Salinger continued
to write during his seclusion from the world.
"I'm
guessing there is a trove of unpublished works," Wenke says. (Salinger's
literary agent had no comment.)
Says novelist T.C. Boyle:
"I wonder now if we'll see more stories. I absolutely hope so. I hope he's
been writing some great stories that will blow us away."
Contributing:
Anthony DeBarros and Bob Minzesheimer.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-01-29-salingerinside29_ST_N.htm?obref=obinsite
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