About J.D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City in 1919, served in World War II (he was among the first Allied troops to enter a liberated concentration camp), and published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. The novel was an immediate success and an enduring cultural touchstone. Salinger spent the subsequent decades becoming increasingly reclusive — moving to Cornish, New Hampshire, refusing interviews, and publishing almost nothing. He died in 2010. His estate has indicated that unpublished works may be released in the years ahead, but nothing has appeared yet.

There are four published books. That's the complete Salinger. And all four of them, to varying degrees, are worth reading. The Catcher in the Rye remains one of the most divisive major novels in American literature — readers who first encounter it as teenagers tend to adore it; readers who come to it as adults often find Holden Caulfield exhausting. Both responses are valid. The Glass family stories — Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters — are more interesting to most adult readers and show a stranger, more ambitious mind than the Holden novel alone suggests.