J. D. Salinger be a prequel to "The Catcher in the Rye". Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York on January 1, 1919. His father, Sol Salinger, sold kosher cheese, and was from a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent, his own father having been the rabbi for the Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Salinger's mother, Marie ("née" Jillich), was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of German, Irish, and Scottish descent, but changed her name to Miriam and considered herself Jewish after marrying Salinger's father. Salinger did not learn that his mother was not of Jewish ancestry until just after he celebrated
J. D. Salinger and "New Yorker" editor William Maxwell asked Salinger about his literary influences. Salinger responded: "A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge. I won't name any living writers. I don't think it's right" (although O'Casey was in fact living at the time). In letters written in the 1940s, Salinger had expressed his admiration of three living, or recently