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1.1 J.D. Salinger’s Life and Works
Jerome David Salinger (January 1, 1919-January 27, 2010) is one of the most important contemporary writers of American fiction who has published several short story collections and one novel The Catcher in the Rye which was an immediate success after being published in 1951. The novel has been perceived as a partly autobiographical novel because there are a lot of similarities between Salinger and the novel’s protagonist Holden Caulfield. Salinger was born in New York City in 1919 and his father was a Jewish merchant selling kosher cheese, so Salinger was raised up in a affluent family. At the age of fifteen, his parent enrolled him at a military academy during which Salinger began to practice writing short stories and he “showed an innate talent for drama”, but his father opposed the idea of Salinger’s becoming an actor. During his college years, he has changed universities and majors several times and his father once urged him to learn about the meat-importing business but Salinger later still insisted his own writing career. While studying at Columbia University, Salinger devoted himself entirely to writing, and by 1940 he had published several short stories in periodicals. Unfortunately, his career as a writer was interrupted by World War II in 1942. During the military service(1942-1946), Salinger married a woman doctor in continental Europe but they got porced just after eight months because they couldn’t fit each other in temperament and disposition and so on. Salinger came back to New York City after his demobilization and resumed his writing career, writing short stories primarily for The New Yorker like A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948), which tells of the suicide of a despairing war veteran.
The success of The Catcher in the Rye brought public attention and scrutiny. Salinger gradually withdrew from public view, moving from an apartment in bustling New York to secluded Cornish, a town in New Hampshire, where he bought about 90 acres of land near a mountain and built a house on the top of the mountain with a lot of trees around it. Besides, Salinger even installed a six-foot-high wire netting fitted with alarms outside the house. To be a deaf-mute living in seclusion is the novel’s protagonist Holden’s dream and Salinger seemed also to live that kind of life.
Till now, except the popular work The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s published work are all short stories collections including nine stories(1953), Franny and Zooey(1961), Raise High the Roof Bean, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction(1963) and The complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger(1974). Salinger’s works are usually about the theme of idealist having difficulties in getting along with the world around him. New York Times’ comments hit the nail on the head, “overall, Salinger’s writing is not the most obvious— although his dialogue is still fresh and good—but his thoughts.” Mr. Salinger is obsessed with what adolescent Holden calls “hypocrisy” and “truth”. It is this theme that has led to the story of the Glass family—a question of consciousness and self-awareness about how to live a spiritual life in a rough and materialistic world.
1.2 The Plots of The Catcher in the Rye
In 1951 Salinger released his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and although it generated many controversies over its vulgar language, it got an immediate success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and confusions and escape tendency about into the adulthood and society in the young protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers.