Salinger, J. D.
Salinger, J. D. , ( Jerome David Salinger ) ( 1919 – ),American novelist and short story writer, born in New York. He served with the 4th Infantry Division in the Second World War and was stationed at Tiverton, Devon, in Mar. 1944 , an experience which inspired his story ‘For Esme with Love and Squalor’. He is best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye ( 1951 ), the story of adolescent Holden Caulfield who runs away from boarding school in Pennsylvania to New York, where he preserves his innocence despite various attempts to lose it. The colloquial, lively, first-person narration, with its attacks on the ‘phoniness’ of the adult world and its clinging to family sentiment in the form of Holden's affection for his sister Phoebe, made the novel accessible to and popular with a wide readership, particularly with the young. A sequence of works about the eccentric Glass family began with Nine Stories (...
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