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Summary
Summary
One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in the Times of London calls "energetic and magnificently researched"-a book from which "a true picture of Salinger emerges." Filled with new information and revelations garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records, J. D. Salinger: A Life presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. Kenneth Slawenski explores Salinger's privileged youth, long obscured by misrepresentation and rumor, revealing the brilliant, sarcastic, vulnerable son of a disapproving father and doting mother and his entrance into a social world where Gloria Vanderbilt dismissively referred to him as "a Jewish boy from New York." Here too are accounts of Salinger's first broken heart-Eugene O'Neill's daughter, Oona, left him for the much older Charlie Chaplin-and the devastating World War II service of which he never spoke, and which haunted him forever. J. D. Salinger features all the dazzle of this author's early writing successes, his dramatic encounters with luminaries from Ernest Hemingway to Laurence Olivier to Elia Kazan, his surprising office intrigues with famous New Yorker editors and writers, and the stunning triumph of The Catcher in the Rye, which would both make him world-famous and hasten his retreat into the hills of New Hampshire. Whether it's revealing the facts of his hasty, short-lived first marriage or his lifelong commitment to Eastern religion, which would dictate his attitudes toward sex, nutrition, solitude, and creativity, J. D. Salinger is this unique author's unforgettable story in full-one that no lover of literature can afford to miss.
Author Notes
Kenneth Slawenski is the author of J. D. Salinger: A Life , on which he worked for eight years, and the creator of whe New York Times recommended Web site DeadCaulfields.com.
Norman Dietz, a writer, an actor, and a solo performer, has recorded over 150 audiobooks, many of which have earned him awards from AudioFile magazine, the ALA, and Publishers Weekly . Additionally, AudioFile named Norman one of the Best Voices of the Century.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Slawenski's biography of J.D. Salinger begins with his death, jumps to his ancestry, then moves chronologically from Salinger's time in boarding school and mentorship with Columbia professor Whit Burnett to his early romance with the beautifully dull Oona O'Neill and his eventual isolation in Cornish, N.H. As Sonny Salinger becomes Jerry and eventually J.D., Slawenski sheds light on people and places that might have served as fodder for Salinger's writing, and unearths how formative Salinger's experiences fighting in WWII were to his psyche and craft. The biography is meticulously comprehensive yet compelling throughout, and Norman Dietz's reading voice proves perfect. He tone is warm and soothing, as if he is a grandfather sharing stories about his late best friend whom he adored and hopes the world will, too. A Random hardcover. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Slawenski, creator of the DeadCaulfields.com website, has been working on this biography of the famously reclusive J. D. Salinger for eight years. He is more fan than scholar, but his research is remarkable, given the paucity of material on the author available to the public. Still, Slawenski has read everything that can be read and has constructed a surprisingly coherent version of a life that is likely to remain clouded with uncertainty for decades to come. What emerges from Slawenski's reading is two different lives divided by one cataclysmic event: WWII. Before the war, Salinger was a struggling writer from a well-to-do New York family who was driven by ambition to become famous. Then came the war, during which Salinger, a sergeant in the army, was transformed by chance into a kind of nightmare version of Zelig, turning up in all the wrong places: Utah Beach on D-Day, where two-thirds of his division were killed; the disastrous ambush in the Hurtgen Forest; and the snow-misted horror of the Battle of the Bulge. Throughout the war, Salinger continued to write stories, and gradually, Slawenski argues, he became another kind of author altogether, a man who wrote not for fame but as a kind of meditation, fiction as prayer. With the success of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, fame itself became Salinger's new nightmare, driving him deeper into his wartime psychology. From the point of view of a man who wrote to block out the world, Salinger's decision to stop publishing altogether makes perfect sense. Slawenski's interpretation of Salinger's life is more compelling than his analysis of the writer's stories. As a critic, he suffers from a mix of too much affection, a graduate-student style, and a bad case of symbol-hunting. Still, Slawenski's life of Salinger makes at least speculative sense of a seemingly unknowable story, one that has beguiled readers for more than 50 years. That alone makes his book must reading. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: To be published one year to the day after Salinger's death on January 25, 2010, an event that reenergized the public's compulsion to know more about the reclusive author, this biography, by far the most complete so far, will kick Salinger fever into another gear.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
J.D. Salinger spent the first third of his life trying to get noticed and the rest of it trying to disappear. He would have hated "J.D. Salinger: A Life," Kenneth Slawenski's reverent new biography, which comes to us just a year after the writer's death and creditably unearths and aggregates the facts and reads them into the fiction - reanimating the corpse without quite making it sing. If you really want to hear about it, what's missing - and this is not necessarily Slawenski's fault - is Salinger's voice. I was tempted to say his inimitable voice, but of course it's been imitated more often than that of any American writer, except possibly Salinger's pal Hemingway, infiltrating the language of our literature and refertilizing the American vernacular from which it sprang. Slawenski is handicapped in part by the legacy of Ian Hamilton, author of "In Search of J.D. Salinger" (1988). As Slawenski recounts, after being stonewalled by Salinger and his small, tight circle of friends, Hamilton tracked down a great deal of unpublished correspondence and quoted extensively from Salinger's letters and books. When a galley of the book reached Salinger, he called in the lawyers and demanded that Random House remove quotations of unpublished letters from the text. The initial district court ruling in favor of Random House and Hamilton was overturned on appeal - with major repercussions for American copyright law and with the immediate result that Hamilton was forced to paraphrase the letters he'd relied so heavily on. Slawenski is muzzled by that 1987 ruling and also by his fastidious interpretation of fair-use copyright law in regard to quoting from the fiction, limiting himself pretty much to short phrases. The bulk of the book was written when the litigious Salinger was still alive, but I can't help wondering if his heirs might have proved a little more relaxed about quotation. Margaret Salinger's memoir, "Dream Catcher" (2000), to which Slawenski is heavily indebted, quotes great swatches of the prose, but she may have presumed that even J. D. Salinger was loath to sue his own daughter. THE most comprehensive biography to date has been Paul Alexander's "Salinger" (1999), which was sympathetic but far from hagiographiv. Slawenski is a fan, not to say a fanatic. For seven years he's run a Web site called Dead Caulfields, and in a maudlin introduction he reports on his anguish upon learning of his subject's death. "The news stared me down from my in-box through the starkest, most ugly of headers. It read: Rest in Peace J. D. Salinger. . . . Impossibly, I fumbled for a sentiment that would match the man." Readers looking for a balanced assessment may be inclined to stop here, where the page is virtually damp. Thankfully, the tone of the book itself is generally more measured. Slawenski seems to have uncovered the facts of Salinger's lineage, about which the writer and his sister were in doubt. His mother, Miriam, née Marie Jillich, was born in a small town in Iowa of German and Irish stock. Her fair skin and red hair seem to have given credence to the widely circulated idea that she was an Irish immigrant, which is what Salinger told his daughter. Marie changed her name to Miriam, after the sister of Moses, not long after she married Solomon Salinger, who managed a theater in Chicago before moving to New York to work as an importer of European meats and cheeses. Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City in 1919 and grew up in increasing prosperity in a nonsecular household that "celebrated both Christmas and Passover." (Although, according to Margaret's memoir, he celebrated his bar mitzvah shortly before learning he was only half Jewish.) In 1932, the family moved from the Upper West Side to the decidedly gentile Park Avenue, to the rambling apartment that would become the Glass family home in "Franny and Zooey." Young Sonny, as he was known, went to camp, attended the McBurney School on the West Side before being expelled for poor grades, and eventually went to Valley Forge Military Academy, which, years later transmogrified into Pencey Prep, the unhappy backdrop of Holden Caulfield's adolescence. Slawenski judges that Salinger himself, after a rocky start, seems to have thrived at Valley Forge. Though not insensitive to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism in the period in which Salinger grew up - an era when most Ivy League colleges had strict quotas limiting the number of Jews - the author reveals no overt instances of it in the young Salinger's life, although his sister, Doris, told her niece, "I think he suffered terribly from anti-Semitism when he went away to military school." Salinger's education after that was desultory: a semester at New York University and yet another at Ursinus, a small college in Pennsylvania. It was only when he enrolled in a short-story writing class at Columbia in 1939 that he found his calling under the tutelage of Whit Burnett, founder and editor of Story magazine. Salinger's first published story, "The Young Folks," appeared in Story shortly after his 21st birthday. Set at a young adult party in Manhattan, it's a sketch more than a story, but Salinger's deft use of dialogue and mastery of idiomatic speech are already on display. Jerry, as he was now called, decided to embark on a literary career instead of re-enrolling at Columbia, but his early triumph was followed by a string of rejections. Still, he found representation with Harold Ober Associates, the literary agency that also represented his idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald. (While Hemingway, whom he would later meet and correspond with, was an obvious influence, Salinger always held the author of "Gatsby" in higher regard. "I was crazy about 'The Great Gatsby,'" Holden says. "Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.") EVEN as he struggled to find his voice, Salinger enjoyed social success with a fashionable group of debutantes that included Eugene O'Neill's daughter, Oona, who was 16 when she met the 22-year-old Salinger. Apparently, it wasn't her mind that captivated him. "She was a blank," the daughter of a friend of Salinger's said, "but she was stunning in her beauty." Unfortunately, Slawenski, lacking the specifics, reaches for clichés: "Catering to Oona's flamboyant tastes, he paraded down Fifth Avenue with her, dined at fine restaurants he could barely afford and spent evenings sipping cocktails at the glamorous Stork Club, where they socialized with movie stars and high-society celebrities in an atmosphere that must have made Salinger cringe." Which restaurants? Did they really socialize with movie stars, or just share the room with them? What was said? The speculative, conditional mode of the last phrase indicates just how little we know. Slawenski's brief sketch of Salinger's postwar adventures in Greenwich Village is similarly hackneyed; his associates are labeled "trendy artist types" and "in-vogue intellectuals." In October 1941, Salinger got the news that The New Yorker, which he'd been deluging with submissions, had accepted his story "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." The story marked the debut of Holden Caulfield, although it's told in the third person rather than in the intimate first person of "The Catcher in the Rye." Before The New Yorker published the story, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, after which the editors judged Holden and his whining about the Madison Avenue bus to be out of tune with the new public mood and suspended publication of "Slight Rebellion" indefinitely. For this reader, the great achievement of Slawenski's biography is its evocation of the horror of Salinger's wartime experience. Despite Salinger's reticence, Slawenski admirably retraces his movements and recreates the savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen bivouacs of Salinger's war. It's hard to think of an American writer who had more combat experience. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Slawenski reports that of the 3,080 members of Salinger's regiment who landed with him on June 6, 1944, only 1,130 survived three weeks later. Then, when the 12th Infantry Regiment tried to take the swampy, labyrinthine Hürtgen Forest, in what proved to be a huge military blunder, the statistics were even more horrific. After reinforcement, "of the original 3,080 regimental soldiers who went into Hürtgen, only 563 were left." Salinger escaped the deadly quagmire of Hürtgen just in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, and shortly thereafter, in 1945, participated in the liberation of Dachau. "You could live a lifetime," he later told his daughter, "and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose." That July he checked himself into a hospital for treatment of what we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. In a letter to Hemingway, whom he'd met at the Ritz bar shortly after the liberation of Paris, he wrote that he'd been "in an almost constant state of despondency." He would later allude to that experience in "For Esmé - With Love and Squalor." Readers are left to imagine the horrors between the time that Sergeant X, stationed in Devon, England, meets Esmé and her brother, Charles, two war orphans, and the time that Esmé's letter reaches him in Bavaria a year later, after he has suffered a nervous breakdown. It seems remarkable that this deeply ambitious writer, who continued to send stories to Ober from foxholes, chose not to write about his combat experience when he clearly had the material for a European-campaign version of "The Naked and the Dead." From another angle - Slawenski sees it this way - his avoidance of the most dramatic material of his life suggests post-traumatic stress disorder. Salinger did write several stories about the war years, at least two of which could stand alongside those he eventually collected in "Nine Stories." But with one exception, they took place on the home front, as is the case with "Last Day of the Last Furlough" and "The Stranger," with its haunting echoes of Fitzgerald. Listen to Babe Gladwaller, home from the war, examining a pile of records: "His mind began to hear the old Bakewell Howard's rough, fine horn playing. Then he began to hear the music of the unrecoverable years . . . when all the dead boys in the 12th Regiment had been living and cutting in on other dead boys on lost dance floors: the years when no one who could dance worth a damn had ever heard of Cherbourg or St.-Lô, or Hürtgen Forest or Luxembourg." ONLY "A Boy in France," a meditative story about a soldier's attempt to find a dry foxhole in which to sleep, takes place on the front lines, and Salinger chose not to reprint it. Slawenski claims that "through his writings, he sought answers to the questions that his service experiences had exposed, questions of life and death, of God, of what we are to each other." Perhaps, though this list of concerns applies to any number of writers who never fired a shot in anger. The war hovers in the background of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," published in The New Yorker in January 1948, after Salinger spent a year revising it with the help of William Maxwell. After passing a day on the beach at a Florida hotel chatting with a bratty young girl and avoiding his wife, Seymour Glass blows his brains out with a pistol. The story opens with a conversation between Seymour's wife, Muriel, and her mother, during which it is suggested that Seymour's behavior has become erratic since he returned from the war. The precision of observation and the ear for dialogue are masterly; the ending is as abrupt as a car crash. Readers who aren't baffled tend to attribute Seymour's suicide to his wartime trauma - although there's also a school of thought that blames his horrible wife. On the basis of that story Salinger was offered a "first look" contract with The New Yorker, although his relationship with the magazine's editors under Harold Ross was difficult. They rejected several of his stories before publishing "For Esmé," the most hopeful and affirmative of his early stories, which elicited a raft of fan mail from readers. Also rejected was "The Catcher in the Rye," which Salinger had completed in the fall of 1950, some nine years after Holden Caulfield was born in "Slight Rebellion." In his letter, Gus Lobrano, Salinger's editor, complained of "writer-consciousness." The intimate, idiomatic, self-conscious first-person narrative of "Catcher," many degrees warmer than the cool Flaubertian mode of his early New Yorker short stories, didn't fit the magazine's standards of literary decorum. When "The Catcher in the Rye" was published by Little, Brown in 1951, the critical and popular reception was more favorable, although the reviews were much more mixed than Slawenski would have us believe. It was praised as "unusually brilliant" in The New York Times and soon appeared on the Times best-seller list, where it would remain for seven months. William Faulkner was a big fan. Despite its immediate success, its enormous impact on the culture was gradual and inexorable. Several years before Elvis or James Dean came along - let alone the Beats or the Beatles - Salinger practically invented teenage angst. Like Mark Twain, whom he mimicked in the opening line of "The Catcher in the Rye," he injected a new slangy, colloquial tone into our literature. Like Huck, Holden would become an adolescent American icon. In 1974, John Updike remarked, "J. D. Salinger wrote a masterpiece, "The Catcher in the Rye,' recommending that readers who enjoy a book call up the author; then he spent his next 20 years avoiding the telephone." But even before publication, Salinger was showing signs of the mania for privacy that would make him still more famous. He demanded his photograph be removed from the back jacket and decamped for England to avoid the hubbub of publication. There is ample testimony here that he was fiercely private, not to say paranoid, long before celebrity engulfed him. Though Slawenski never quite pronounces the diagnosis, it seems clear he suffered from clinical depression. Slawenski also offers a theoretical justification for his desire for privacy: his devotion to the Buddhist principle of transcending the ego. Shortly after his return to New York from the war, Salinger became absorbed in the study of Zen Buddhism and Catholic mysticism; later his interest would shift to Vedanta, "a form of Eastern philosophy centered on the Hindu Vedas." His religious interests would profoundly color his life and his fiction after "Catcher." (While Slawenski tends to see his religious pursuits evolving systematically, Margaret portrays him as a fickle cultist flitting from one spiritual fad to the next.) "After 'The Catcher in the Rye,'" Slawenski proposes, "the aim of Salinger's ambition shifted and he devoted himself to crafting fiction embedded with religion, stories that exposed the spiritual emptiness inherent in American society." Slawenski gives sympathetic readings of "Franny and Zooey," Salinger's inaugural Glass family chronicles, with their curious amalgam of Christian and Eastern religious notes, in light of Salinger's evolving beliefs. Whereas Holden had railed against phonies, Zooey Glass tells his sister Franny, who has suffered some sort of mental collapse, that even the terrible Professor Tupper is "Christ himself." Everyone is Christ - and, as in Buddhism, all is one. Maybe, although many of us believe that fiction is properly concerned with manyness, the particularities of identity, which Salinger once told his daughter are all Maya, or illusion. Despite its mysticism, "Franny and Zooey" was hugely popular when it was published in 1961, although critics, including Joan Didion and Updike, generally felt that Salinger, besotted with his self-contained, self-satisfied Glass family, was disappearing up his own omphalos. This was an impression that the final book-length installment of the Glass family chronicles, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour - an Introduction," did nothing to dispel. Even the deeply sympathetic Slawenski seems disappointed by "Hapworth 16, 1924," the interminable story that filled most of the June 19, 1965, New Yorker. Taking the form of an impossibly precocious letter from summer camp by 7-year-old Seymour Glass, it was Salinger's last published work. Slawenski devotes a few short chapters to the last half of Salinger's life, his self-imposed silent exile in Cornish, N.H. A girlfriend of mine who met him in the Dartmouth library in the mid-'70s and subsequently had lunch with him told me that he talked mainly about his macrobiotic diet, holistic medicine and his garden. After he divorced Claire Douglas, his second wife, who was just 16 when they started dating, he conducted several affairs with young women, notably 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, whose memoir about her months in Cornish enraged the faithful and tended to confirm the suspicion that one would rather read Salinger than meet him. Salinger always told friends he was still writing, and it's possible there's a trove of unpublished stories and novels, although readers of "Hapworth," in which he seems to be talking to himself rather than to fans of "The Catcher in the Rye," may wonder whether they wish to see it "J. D. Salinger: A Life" leaves this and many other questions hanging. Though Slawenski adds to the record, Paul Alexander's biography is, to my mind, more dramatically vivid and psychologically astute. There will probably never be a definitive biography of Salinger, but our understanding will be modified by the actions of his executors and the release of unpublished material in the coming years. For the moment, at least, Holden's creator might take some satisfaction in knowing the extent to which his efforts to erase his own story have succeeded. From D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge: is there an American writer who had more combat experience than J. D. Salinger? Jay McInerney is the author of seven novels. His most recent book is "How It Ended: New and Collected Stories."
Kirkus Review
Impressively researched, sympathetic critical biography of one of the 20th century's most perplexing fiction authors.Jerome David Salinger (19192010) built his literary reputation in the 1950s and '60s on a string of short stories and a novel,The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which artfully explored youthful precocity, social alienation and religious epiphany. Yet at the height of his fame, Salinger decided to escape the spotlight. After his story "Hapworth 16, 1924," was published in the New Yorker in 1965, he maintained almost total public silence until his death. Consequently, Salinger acquired a second reputation as an infamously eccentric recluse, but Slawenski's biography shows how the author's seclusion naturally flowed out of his personal experience and metaphysical anxiety. Born to a well-off New York family, Salinger harbored literary ambitions from an early age, and though he aspired to the high-art pinnacle of theNew Yorker, his early work mostly emerged in little magazines like Storyor "slicks" likeCollier's and The Saturday Evening Post. Manhandling of his manuscripts by editors made Salinger skeptical about the publishing industry; a brutalizing Army experience during World War II, where he took part in the D-Day invasion, made him obsessive about the nature of man and God. Classic stories such as "For EsmWith Love and Squalor" were the product of a writer unsure of how to make his way in the world, and Slawenski patiently tracks how Salinger's growing interest in Eastern religion meshed with an increased fastidiousness about his writing. That's a recipe for a reclusive author, though fewer than 50 pages of the book deal with Salinger's half-century of seclusion, dwelling little on the gossipy details that emerged in memoirs such as those by his one-time lover Joyce Maynard. In Slawenski's reckoning, Salinger died not a cloistered misanthrope but a defiantly monklike soula writer so obsessed with perfecting his vision of the world that he had to abandon it to get the story right.Slawenski, the creator of deadcaulfields.com, is an admirer, but this is no fanboy biography; his close study of Salinger's roots admirably redirects attention to his writing and thought instead of his self-imposed exile.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010), whose novels were quite daring when first published and have since become required reading for students, was one of America's best-known literary recluses. Slawenski has written-and Norman Dietz reads-a biography intended to give a larger sense of Salinger's life, times, and works. The biographer's timing was perfect; serious readers are still aware of and curious about Salinger. Slawenski gives his readers a sense of the author's childhood and background, makes connections between Salinger and other well-known artists of his time (for example, Ernest Hemingway), and offers an explanation as to why Salinger retreated to New Hampshire. Dietz, who has been named one of the Best Voices of the Century, offers a pleasurable listening experience. Academics and literary readers will appreciate the work. ["Salinger enthusiasts will want to read this, so libraries should certainly purchase," read the review of the Los Angeles Times and New York Times best-selling Random House hc, LJ 1/11; the pb, also from Random House, will publish in January 2012.-Ed.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. Sonny The Great War had changed everything. As 1919 dawned, people awoke to a fresh new world, one filled with promise but uncertainty. Old ways of life, beliefs and assumptions unchallenged for decades, were now called into question or swept away. The guns had fallen silent only weeks before. The Old World now lay in ruins. In its place stood a new nation poised to assume the mantle of leadership. No place in that land was more anxious or more ready than the city of New York. It was the first day of the first year of peace when Miriam Jillich Salinger gave birth to a son. His sister, Doris, had been born six years before. In the years since Doris's birth, Miriam had suffered a series of miscarriages. This child too was almost lost. So it was with a mixture of joy and relief that Miriam and Solomon Salinger welcomed their son into the world. They named him Jerome David, but from the very first day, they called him Sonny. Sonny was born into a middle-class Jewish family that was both unconventional and ambitious. The Salinger line reached back to the ?village of Sudargas, a tiny Jewish settlement (shtetl) situated on the Polish-Lithuanian border of the Russian Empire, a village where, rec?ords show, the family had lived at least since 1831. But the Salingers were not given to tradition or nostalgia. By the time Sonny was born, their link to that world had nearly evaporated. Sonny's father was robust and motivated, determined to go his own way in life. Typical of the sons of immigrants, he had resolved to free himself of any connection with the world of his parents' birth, a place he considered backward. Unknown to Solomon at the time, his rebellion was actually a family tradition. The Salingers had gone their own way for generations, seldom looking back and growing increasingly prosperous with each step. As Sonny would one day reflect, his ancestors had an amazing penchant "for diving from immense heights into small containers of water"--and hitting their mark every time.1 Hyman Joseph Salinger, Sonny's great-grandfather, had moved from Sudargas to the more prosperous town of Taurage in order to marry into a prominent family. Through his writings, J. D. Salinger later immortalized his great-grandfather as the clown Zozo, honor- ing him as the family patriarch and confiding that he felt his great-?grandfather's spirit always watched over him. Hyman Joseph remained in Russia all his life and died nine years before the birth of his great-grandson. Salinger knew of him only through a photograph, an image that offered a glimpse into another world. It depicted an elderly peasant brimming with nobility, erect in his long black gown and flowing white beard, and sporting a tremendous nose--a feature that Salinger confessed made him shudder with apprehension.2 Sonny's grandfather Simon F. Salinger was also ambitious. In 1881, a year of famine (though not in Taurage itself), he left home and family and immigrated to the United States. Soon after arriving in America, Simon married Fannie Copland, also a Lithuanian immigrant, at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The couple then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where they found an apartment in one of the city's many immigrant neighborhoods and where, on March 16, 1887, Fannie gave birth to Sonny's father, Solomon, the second of five surviving children.3 By 1893, the Salingers were living in Louisville, Kentucky, where Simon attended medical school. His religious training in Russia served him well, enabling him to practice as a rabbi in order to finance his education.4 Upon obtaining his medical degree, Simon left the pulpit and, after a brief return to Pennsylvania, moved the family to its final destination in the center of Chicago, where he set up a general practice not far from Cook County Hospital.5 Sonny knew his grandfather well, as do readers of The Catcher in the Rye. Dr. Salinger often traveled to New York to visit his son and was the basis of Holden Caulfield's grandfather, the endearing man who would embarrass Holden by read?ing all the street signs aloud while riding on the bus. Simon Salinger died in 1960, just short of his hundredth birthday. ... In the opening lines of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield refuses to share his parents' past with the reader, deriding any recount of "how they were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap." "My parents," he explains, "would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them." This apparent elusiveness on the part of Holden's parents was imported directly from the attitudes of Salinger's own mother and father. Sol and Miriam rarely spoke of past events, especially to their children, and their attitude created an air of secrecy that permeated the Salinger household and caused Doris and Sonny to grow into intensely private people. The Salingers' insistence upon privacy also led to rumors. Over the years, Miriam and Sol's story has been repeatedly embellished. This began in 1963, when the literary critic Warren French repeated a claim in a Life magazine article that Miriam had been Scotch-Irish. In time, the term "Scotch-Irish" transformed itself into the assertion that Salinger's mother had actually been born in County Cork, Ireland. This led in turn to what is perhaps the most commonly repeated story told about Salinger's mother and father: that Miriam's parents, supposedly Irish Catholic, were so adamantly opposed to her marriage to Sol, because he was Jewish, that they gave the couple little choice but to elope. And, upon learning of their daughter's defiance, they never spoke a word to her again. None of this has any basis in fact, yet by the time of her death in 2001, even Salinger's sister, Doris, had been persuaded that her mother had been born in Ireland and that she and Sonny had been purposely denied a relationship with their grandparents. The circumstances surrounding Miriam's family and her marriage to Sol were quite painful enough without embroidery through rumor. However, Salinger's parents exacerbated that pain by attempting to conceal their past from their children. In doing so, they not only invited fictitious versions of their history but confused their children too. By attempting to restrain Doris's and Sonny's natural curiosity, Miriam and Sol actually gave credence to a fabricated past that remained with them all their lives. Sonny's mother was born Marie Jillich on May 11, 1891, in the small midwestern town of Atlantic, Iowa.6 Her parents, Nellie and George Lester Jillich, Jr., were twenty and twenty-four, respectively, at the time of her birth, and records show that she was the second of six surviving children.7 Marie's grandparents George Lester Jillich, Sr., and Mary Jane Bennett had been the first Jillichs to settle in Iowa. The grandson of German immigrants, George, Sr., had moved from Mas?sachusetts to Ohio, where he met and married his wife. He served briefly with the 192nd Ohio Regiment during the Civil War, and after he returned home in 1865, Mary Jane gave birth to Marie's father. George, Sr., eventually established himself as a successful grain merchant and by 1891 was in firm position as head of the Jillich clan, with his sons George, Jr., and Frank following him into the trade. Although Marie later maintained that her mother, Nellie McMahon, had been born in Kansas City in 1871, the daughter of Irish immigrants, four sets of federal census records (1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930) suggest that she is more likely to have come from Iowa. Family tradition has it that Marie met Solomon early in 1910 at a county fair near the Jillich family farm (an unlikely location since no such farm existed). The manager of a Chicago movie theater, Solomon, who was called "Sollie" by his family and "Sol" by his friends, was six feet tall with a whiff of big-city sophistication. Just seventeen, Marie was an arresting beauty, with fair skin and long red hair that contrasted with Sol's olive complexion. Their romance was immediate and intense, and Sol was determined to marry Marie from the start. A rapid series of events, some of them heartbreaking, would occur that year, culminating in Marie's marriage to Sol in the spring of 1910. While the Salingers had steadily improved their position since Simon's arrival, the Jillichs had suddenly encountered difficulties. Marie's father had died the previous year.8 Unable to keep the family afloat, her mother had taken the youngest of the children and relocated to Michigan, where she later remarried. Marie did not move with her mother, because of her age and her relationship with Sol. Her swift romance and marriage to Solomon therefore proved to be providential, especially when, by the time of Sonny's birth in 1919, her mother, Nellie, had also died.9 The loss of both parents was possibly enough to make Marie reluctant to discuss them even with her own children. Rather than cling to the past, she devoted herself completely to a new life with her new husband. Left with only the Salingers now as family, she sought their acceptance by embracing Judaism and changing her name to Miriam, after the sister of Moses. Simon and Fannie thought that Marie, with her milky-fair skin and auburn hair, looked like "a little Irisher."10 In a city with thousands of eligible Jewish girls, they never dreamed that Sollie would bring home a red-haired Gentile from Iowa, but they accepted Miriam as their new daughter-in-law, and she soon moved into their Chicago home. Miriam joined Sol working at the movie theater, where she sold tickets and concessions. Despite their efforts, the theater was unsuccessful and was forced to close, sending the new bridegroom in search of employment. He soon found a position working for J. S. Hoffman & Company, an importer of European cheeses and meats that went by the brand name Hofco. After the disappointment with the theater, Sol swore never to fail at business again and applied himself to his new company duties with devotion. This dedication paid off, and after Doris's birth in December 1912, he was promoted to general manager of Hoffman's New York division, becoming, as he coolly declared, "the manager of a cheese factory." Sol's new position required the Salingers to move to New York City, where they settled into a comfortable apartment at 500 West 113th Street, close to Columbia University and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Although Sol was now in the business of vending a series of hams--distinctly the most unkosher of foods--along with his cheeses, he had managed to continue the Salinger custom of advancing beyond the previous generation, an accomplishment of which he was extraordinarily proud. But business became his life, and by the time of his thirtieth birthday in 1917, his hair had gone completely "iron grey."12 ... Until he was thirteen, Sonny attended public school on the Upper West Side. This is a class photo of Salinger and his schoolmates on the steps of P.S. 166, circa 1929. The 1920s were years of unparalleled prosperity, and no place shone brighter than New York City. It was the economic, cultural, and intellectual capital of the Americas, perhaps even of the world. Its values were beamed across the continent through radio and absorbed by millions through publications. Its streets held sway over the economic vitality of nations, and its advertising and markets determined the desires and tastes of a generation. In this opportune place and time, the Salin?gers thrived. Between the years of Sonny's birth in 1919 through to 1928, Sol and Miriam moved the family three times, always to a more affluent Manhattan neighborhood. When Sonny was born, they were living at 3681 Broadway, in an apartment located in North Harlem. Before year's end, they had moved back to their original New York neighborhood, into a residence at 511 West 113th Street. A more ambitious move came in 1928, when the family rented an apartment just a few blocks from Central Park at 215 West 82nd Street. This home came complete with servants' quarters, and Sol and Miriam quickly hired a live-in maid, an Englishwoman named Jennie Burnett. Sonny grew up in a world of increasing comfort, insulated by his parents' indulgence and their growing social status. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from J. D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
