J. D. Salinger J. D. Salinger Jerome David Salinger (; January 1, 1919 January 27, 2010) was an American writer known for his widely read novel, "The Catcher in the Rye". Following his early success publishing short stories and "The Catcher in the Rye", Salinger led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980. Salinger was raised in Manhattan and began writing short stories while in secondary school. Several were published in "Story" magazine in the early 1940s before he began serving in World War II. In
J. D. Salinger the standards of "The New Yorker" editors, among them William Shawn, to refine his writing into the "spare, teasingly mysterious, withheld" qualities of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948), "The Catcher in the Rye", and his stories of the early 1950s. By the late 1950s, as Salinger became more reclusive and involved in religious study, Hamilton notes that his stories became longer, less plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression and parenthetical remarks. Louis Menand agrees, writing in "The New Yorker" that Salinger "stopped writing stories, in the conventional sense ... He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art