Best known for his popular 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, Jerome David Salinger was an American author whose engaging coming of age narratives garnered him a cult following during the latter half of the 20th century. Born in 1919 to a middle class Jewish family in Manhattan, New York, Salinger was a mediocre student growing up, showing little academic inclination and never earning a college degree. It wasn’t until taking a class taught by American writer Whit Burnett that Salinger’s talent was first recognized, with Burnett assuming the role of a mentor and encouraging him to continue submitting his short stories to magazines for publication. After experiencing limited success, Salinger was drafted into the U.S. army and saw combat in Europe during World War II, a traumatic experience that proved to bear significant influence on his later writing.
After returning from the War, Salinger began work on his debut novel, a planned adaptation of one of his earlier short stories about the experiences of a delinquent teenage boy after his expulsion from preparatory school. This novel was eventually published in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye and was met with near immediate commercial and critical acclaim. With the growing notoriety that came with Catcher’s success, however, Salinger became increasingly irritable with the attention he was receiving for it and began to retreat from the public eye. After publishing several collections of short stories over the course of the following decade, Salinger’s reclusive tendencies began to permeate into his literary presence as well, with his last published work coming in 1963. Living out the remainder of his life in the relative solitude of Cornish, New Hampshire, Salinger died in 2010 at the age of 91.