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
(2 of 2)
Is that surprising? A long time ago, he called things off with the entire world. Salinger struggled all his long life with the contradiction between his gifts as a writer and his impulse to refuse them. It's customary to assume that the Glass children of his short stories--an intricate hybrid of show biz and spirituality, the family was his other enduring creation--make up a kind of group portrait of Salinger, each a different reflection of his character: the writer and the actor, the searcher and the researcher, the spiritual adept and the pratfalling schmuck. That may very well be true. He made sure we could never be sure. But here's Franny Glass outlining the dilemma of someone like Salinger who wants to abandon the ego, the will to "succeed":
"Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash."
That's one time you know it's Salinger talking.
Salinger on the cover of TIME in 1961. Top: the author (reading Catcher in the Rye) in 1952