Saturday Review of Literature July 14, 1951

Biographical sketches of most preset-day writers usually remark the variety in their lives. But though J(erome) D(avid) Salinger has done a variety of things and traveled to a variety of places the most significant pattern is that he is a writer - constantly, concentratedly. He was born in New York City New Year's Day, 1919; at fifteen he was sent to military school. He didn't like it - comparatively few boys do - but he did more than most other boys do in such a situation. He griped, of course; but he also found a way to provide a congenial spiritual home: at night, hooding flashlight under the bedcovers, he wrote stories. He has kept on writing stories wherever he is, whatever else doing. Rejection slips did not deflect his intention nor did successful sales. (Of the dangers to a young writer the latter seems sometimes the more deadly.) With the Army in the Third World War, first in this country and then in France (where he landed on D-Day with the Fourth Division), he went on writing and thinking writing. Again, like most other young men, he did not like war - "progressively platitudinous and lonely" he called it once - but he did his job in it, yet managed to keep on building that own country of the mind, by typewriter if one were near, by hand if not. He brought home Benny, a Schnauzer, who has been his prime companion in his Westport, Connecticut, home. (He's not the lonely hermit this might indicate - but you don't have to take time to explain to a dog, even in the words of one syllable, that there are times when a man needs to be at his typewriter....) He also brought home Holden Caulfield, hero-narrator of "Catcher." Holden, however, had been around for a long time, as imagined personality, as trial short-story subject, and finally embodied in a novelette. The embodiment did not satisfy its author, so he went to work again. There are bound to be guesses that Holden is (or was) J. D. Factually the guesses will be wrong. But in that created home of the writer which J. D. has been so persistently building Holden must be a nearly interchangeable brother in his search for integrity and his own approach to writing. (Which see - in one of the best descriptions we've ever read of the whole process from inception through writer's catharsis to effect on public - in the book, page 49-54.) ---K. S.