Reclusive Author J. D. Salinger Dead

J.D. Salinger, author of the well-loved classic Catcher in the Rye died of natural causes earlier today. Its narrator, 17 year old Holden Caulfield seems adrift, failing out of school, wandering in New York. He observes the world around him and often does not like what he sees and hears. He cries out against phoniness, describing an acquaintance “The jerk had one of those very phony, Ivy League voices, one of those very tried, snobby voices.” Later Holden reveals the meaning of the title: "I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in a big field of rye and all. ... Thousands of kids, and nobody big at all, nobody big but me. And I'm standing on the edge of this crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to come and catch them. If they start to fall ... and don't look where they're going. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all." Although many have sought the rights to the Catcher in the Rye, Salinger refused to sell rights to any of his work. The novel brought much unwanted attention to the private Salinger. A few years after it was published, he decided to live in seclusion. In a rare 1980 interview with Betty Eppes, he said "There's a marvelous peace in not publishing. There's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself." Salinger published no other full-length novel. His shorter fiction includes Nine Stories(1953); Franny and Zooey(1961); and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). Much of this work was published initially in the New Yorker magazine, as was his last story to be published, Hapworth 16, 1924, which appeared in the New Yorker in 1965. His daughter Margaret Ann Salinger has said that her father wrote many stories to be published after his death. We wait.