J.D. Salinger
Today, the idea of adolescence as a separate, often troubled, period between childhood and adulthood is entrenched in American culture. But the notion of that middle period came into vogue, as an American creation, only in the 1890s.
And the word “teenager” appears for the first time only in 1941 (though the term “teen age” had appeared in 1921).
So when J.D. Salinger began to explore the world of adolescence in short stories in the mid-1940s, culminating in the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951), he gave unique voice to the self-absorption and angst of this separate age-group culture. Critic Jonathan Yardley, in fact, believes the novel “created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it.”
The main character, Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old from a well-off family in the post-World War II boom, spoke directly to teenagers (and still does today).
You didn’t have to be Depression-era poor to be alienated and anxious, struggling between the innocence of childhood and the perceived corruption (“phoniness”) of the adult world.
In the mid-1950s, Salinger turned to stories about the Glass family, including what became a novella about the youngest of the Glass siblings, “Franny and Zooey” (1961) – an expansion on his theme of misfits in a culture of phonies.
On the cover, Salinger wrote, “Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses.
“It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.”
Salinger died Wednesday at the age of 91. He lived as a recluse in New Hampshire from the mid-1950s and published his last story in 1965.
He never stopped writing, however. That means we may soon hear more from Salinger, if and when his writings from recent decades are published posthumously.