Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Salinger, J. D. - Terry Teachout （essay date September 1987）

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Terry Teachout （essay date September 1987）

SOURCE: “Salinger Then and Now,” in Commentary, Vol. 84, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 61-4.

[In the following essay, Teachout provides an unflattering reevaluation of Salinger's fiction, literary career, and critical reception in the wake of Salinger's lawsuit against biographer Ian Hamilton.]

Even though he has published nothing since 1965, the books of J. D. Salinger remain popular. The Catcher in the Rye alone still sells some 250,000 copies worldwide each year. It has been a long time, however, since anyone worth listening to thought Salinger a first-rate writer, long enough that most of us have forgotten just how seriously he used to be taken by some of our best critics. （“Have you been reading Salinger's stories about the Irish-Jewish Glass family in the New Yorker?” Edmund Wilson wrote to John Dos Passos in 1957. “I think they are very remarkable, quite unlike...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Anne Marple （review date 18 September 1961）
   2. J. D. O'Hara （essay date Winter 1963-1964）
   3. Bernice and Sanford Goldstein （essay date Autumn 1966）
   4. Kerry McSweeney （essay date Spring 1978）
   5. Edwin Haviland Miller （essay date Winter 1982）
   6. Sanford Pinsker （essay date Winter 1986）
   7. Max F. Schulz （essay date 1987）
   8. Helen Weinberg （essay date 1987）
   9. John Wenke （essay date 1987）
   10. Terry Teachout （essay date September 1987）
   11. Joyce Rowe （essay date 1991）
   12. Peter Shaw （essay date 1991）
   13. Pamela Steinle （essay date 1991）
   14. Susan K. Mitchell （essay date December 1992）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. J. D. Salinger