December 31, 2018

On Jan. 1, 1919, 100 years ago tomorrow, American author J. D. Salinger was born in New York City. Salinger gained fame for writing The Catcher in the Rye (1951), one of the greatest novels in American literature. Salinger shied from his fame, however, and isolated himself in rural New Hampshire from the 1950′s until his death on Jan. 27, 2010.

American author J.D. Salinger was born 100 years ago on Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. Credit: © University of New Hampshire/Gado/Getty Images

The hero and narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is a prep school student named Holden Caulfield, who is expelled for failing grades. Adrift in New York City, Holden learns to face both the phoniness he finds in the adult world and his own weaknesses. In Catcher, and in much of the fiction that followed, Salinger humorously and convincingly captured the speech, gestures, and feelings of the young. A staple in schools throughout the United States, The Catcher in the Rye came to symbolize restless youth everywhere.

Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) introduces the Glass family, central figures of the author’s later works. One story in this book focuses on Seymour Glass, an eccentric genius whose suicide haunts the family in other fiction. In Franny and Zooey (1961), Franny Glass suffers a spiritual breakdown. Her brother Zooey blames his older brothers for Franny’s condition, but he draws on their wisdom to help her. Salinger also focused on Seymour in three stories first published in The New Yorker magazine. These stories are “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955), “Seymour: An Introduction” (1959), and “Hapworth 16, 1924″ (1965).

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Salinger’s birth, the author’s works are being reissued and a series of Salinger-themed events in bookstores and libraries will take place across the country in 2019, including an exhibition from Salinger’s archive at the New York Public Library.