J.D. Salinger

Born on January 1, 1919, in Manhattan, Jerome David Salinger was the son of a Jewish father who imported ham and cheese, a detail that seemed to amuse him, and a Scotch-Irish mother who changed her name to Miriam to fit into her husband's family. He grew up on Park Avenue and attended several prep schools before enrolling at Valley Forge Military Academy, which became the model for Pencey Prep in his most famous work. He published his first short story in Story magazine in 1940, served in the infantry during World War II, landing on Utah Beach on D-Day, fighting through the Battle of the Bulge, and entering a liberated concentration camp, and was briefly hospitalized for combat stress afterward. In 1948, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, beginning a relationship that defined mid-century American short fiction. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) made him spectacularly famous overnight, and he immediately began retreating from fame. Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) deepened his portrait of the Glass family, a fictional clan of prodigies haunted by spiritual longing. His last published work, the novella "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965. He then fell silent for forty-five years, living in seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire. He died there on January 27, 2010, at the age of ninety-one.