It's the birthday of J.D. Salinger (books by this author), born Jerome David Salinger in New York City (1919). The notably reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) died in 2010, at the age of 91, after 50 years spent avoiding the public eye as much as possible. But the public never lost interest in him, and in fact the press seemed to enjoy the challenge of trying to ferret out information about the author. Ian Hamilton approached him in 1984, asking permission to write his biography; Salinger turned him down, telling his would-be biographer that he had "borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime." But Hamilton went ahead and published an unauthorized version. Salinger sued him, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Salinger eventually won.
In 1998, a woman named Joyce Maynard published her memoir, At Home in the World. In it, she recounted her 10-month affair with Salinger. He had written her a fan letter when she was a college freshman, after he read an essay she'd published in The New York Times Magazine. After a summer of letters back and forth, Maynard dropped out of Yale and moved in with him; they lived together for almost a year, and in her account, he was eccentric and controlling. Three years later, Salinger's daughter, Margaret, also published her own memoir, Dreamcatcher (2001). She also talked about her father's quirks, adding that he was abusive, self-centered, and expected his children to live up to fictional ideals. Her brother, Matthew, responded to the book by saying his sister had "a troubled mind."
J.D. Salinger, who said: "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."
