J.D. Salinger

Sean Connery's character in Finding Forrester (2000) is based on J.D. Salinger.

The character Terence Mann in Field of Dreams (1989) (based on "Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella) is actually based on J.D. Salinger.

When his wife divorced him in 1966, she stated that Salinger refused to communicate with her, sometimes for weeks on end.

"Nine Stories" (1953), a selection of Salinger's best work, added to his reputation. The reclusive habits of Salinger,an obsessively private man especially over the last half-century of his life, made his personal life a matter of speculation among devotees, while his small literary output was a subject of controversy among critics.

U. S. writer whose novel "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students.

Some of the best of these made use of his wartime experiences: "For Esmé - With Love and Squalor" (1950) describes a U. S.

His entire corpus of published works consists of that one novel and 13 short stories, all originally written in the period 1948-59. Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a mother who adopted Judaism, and, like Holden Caulfield, the hero of "The Catcher in the Rye", he grew up in New York City, attending public schools and a military academy.

soldier's poignant encounter with two British children; "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948) concerns the suicide of the sensitive, despairing veteran Seymour Glass. Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of "The Catcher in the Rye", whose central character, a sensitive, rebellious adolescent, relates in authentic teenage idiom his flight from the "phony" adult world, his search for innocence and truth, and his final collapse on a psychiatrist's couch. The humor and colorful language of "The Catcher in the Rye" place it in the tradition of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and the stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of Salinger's child characters, views his life with an added dimension of precocious self-consciousness.

Army (1942-46), Salinger's name and writing style became increasingly associated with "The New Yorker" magazine, which published almost all of his later stories.

After brief periods at New York and Columbia universities, he devoted himself entirely to writing, and his stories began to appear in periodicals in 1940. After his return from service in the U. S.

It was rumored that J.D. Salinger's mother Miriam was born in County Cork, Ireland, likely fueled by an erroneous assertion in a 1963 "Life Magazine" article that she was Scotch-Irish. This led to a further rumor that Miriam's Irish Catholic parents shunned her and refused to speak to her after marrying the Jew Solomon Salinger. Salinger's sister Doris actually believed that their mother had been born in Ireland. In actuality, Miriam's parents were dead by the time she married. She was born Marie Jillich (she took the name Miriam when she converted to Judaism upon her marriage) in Atlantic, Iowa on May 11, 1891. Miriam's paternal grandfather George Lester Jillich, Sr. was the son of German immigrants, and her paternal grandmother Mary Jane Bennett was Anglo-Saxon. George, Sr. was a successful grain merchant whose son George, Jr. (Miriam's father) worked in the family business. Miriam's mother, Nellie McMahon, a Kansas City native, was the daughter of immigrants from Ireland. Miriam's father died in 1909, the year before she met Solomon Salinger (a Chicago movie theater manager). Miriam's mother Nellie died before J.D. Salinger was born in 1919. Solomon Salinger's parents thought that the fair-skinned, red-haired Marie (as she was then known before her conversion) resembled a "little Irisher".

J.D. Salinger's father's family originally came from Sudargas, a small shtetl (Jewish village), which was then located in the Russian Empire near the present day border of Poland and Lithuania. His great-grandfather Hyman Joseph Salinger moved from Sudargas to the town of Taurage when he married the daughter of a prominent family. Hyman's son Simon F. Salinger emigrated to the United States in 1881, marrying Fannie Copland, a Lithuanian immigrant living in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Simon Salinger went to medical school and became a physician. When he died in 1960, he was just shy of his 100th birthday. J.D. Salinger's father Solomon was born in 1887, the second child of five children.