American author J.D. Salinger, who wrote The Catcher in the Rye , died of natural causes at his home in Cornish, N.H., on Jan. 27, 2010. He was 91
Take the austere little paperbacks down from the shelf and you can hold the collected works of J.D. Salinger one novel, three volumes of stories in the palm of one hand. Like some of his favorite writers like Sappho, whom we know only from ancient fragments, or the Japanese poets who crafted 17-syllable haiku Salinger was an author whose large reputation pivots on very little. The first of his published stories that he thought were good enough to preserve appeared in the New Yorker in 1948. Seventeen years later he placed one last story there and...
