F. Izzah♥J.D. Salinger, the Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger, the Catcher in the Rye

By FithrotulIzzah

Jerome David (J.D.) who was called Sonny in his childhood was born on January 1st 1919, in New York. He was the second and last child of Scotch-Irish mother named Miriam Jillich Salinger and a Jewish father named Sol Salinger. He has one sibling who a sister is named Doris.

J.D Salinger was living at 1133 Park Avenue. He was enrolled in Manhattan’s exclusive McBurney School for ninth and tenth grades. However, he was failing out of McBurney. Then, Salinger’s parents sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. In this school, He was an activist. He participated in the Glee Club, Aviation Club, French Club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.His best recorded IQ was far from a genius level. Finally, He graduated in 1936.

After being graduated from a secondary school, Salinger entered the New York University in 1936. Unfortunately, Salinger was dropped out of New York University in the spring of his freshman year. Then, his father advised him to move to Vienna, Austria, to study the meatpacking business. Then, Salinger enrolled in a writing course at Columbia University. He was professionally taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. Burnett encouraged the young writer’s career, and became a friend and also mentor for Salinger. Salinger then published his piece of fiction, “The Young Folks,” in Story magazine. Greatly, Burnett championed Salinger’s writing continued who would publish other early Salinger pieces in Story. However, he got several rejections. This did not make him gave up. The New Yorker finally accepted one of Salinger’s stories. “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which was the first Salinger story to feature Holden Caulfield. The story was pending to be published because of Pearl Harbor which was also published five years later.

In 1942, Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he had a distinguished military career as a Counter-Intelligence Agent assigned to the 4th Division. He took part in the Battle of the Bulge and, later, entered Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau. He also forged a strong friendship with war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. The nice thing was, Salinger continued his writing career during the war. He was carting his typewriter around in his Jeep. His experiences in the war left a very deep impression on him and proved to be the trauma both of his life and career. His writing was changed forever. After the war, Salinger checked himself into a mental hospital. Sadly to say, He was treated for “combat fatigue” which was post-traumatic stress syndrome.

                However, J.D Salinger life was not till that way. He got married with a German woman named Sylvia Welter. They lived together only eight months, and the marriage officially ended up when Salinger filed for an annulment.

                Salinger was a great person, he was still writing some literary works. He sent all of his works to The New Yorker. After being rejected,The New Yorker thenpublished his short story titled “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,”Actually; this isthe first to feature a character from the fictional Glass family. His story did make a trending topic sensation. Salinger signed a contract with the magazine. He was happy since The New York Magazine was promising to let them have first opportunity at publishing any of his future stories.

'The Catcher In the Rye'

In 1946, Salinger returned to New York. At that famous place, he decided to set about resuming his life as a professional writer. His professionally soon made his work published in his favourite magazine, The New Yorker. He did not stop until this. He also continued to create his literary work on novel. Finally, on July 16, 1951, his famous and influencing novel titled The Catcher in the Rye was published by Little, Brown and Company.

Actually, the novel's plot of Salinger is quite simple. It is all about detailing 16-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City following his expulsion and departure from an elite college preparatory school. How he expelled from his current school, how he had also expelled from other three previous schools.Holden,the first-person narrator, his testimonial voice made the book more notable for the people.

Along the way Holden Caulfield has become as established in the American psyche as much as any fictional character. John Lennon was murdered by assassin Mark David Chapman in New York City. After killing Lennon, Chapman sat down and started to read The Catcher in the Rye. Chapman was the first of several of assassins who quoted The Catcher in the Rye as inspiration for shootings and murders of public figures including President Ronald Reagan and actress Rebecca Schaeffer.Later, the book explained that reason for the shooting which could be found in the book's pages.

Not surprisingly, Catcher did help Salinger to a level of unrivalled literary fame. He was a young writer and had fiercely boasted in college about his talents. The success that he had seemingly craved early in life became something that he ran away from once it came.

The Catcher in The Rye then became an unusually brilliant first novel. This book was so controversial. Catcher used monotonous language and told about “immorality and perversion" of Holden. In the story, Holden uses slurs and freely discusses about casual sex and moreover prostitution. In 1953, Salinger was interviewed by a high school newspaper. At that time, he openly admitted that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical. He explained, "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... it was a great relief telling people about it."His explanation made this book became more controversial.

However, The Catcher In The Rye novel was a very popular success. Only in two months of its publication, this novel had been printed eight times. The greatness is not until this, this novel listed as the bestseller one for 30 weeks. The Catcher in the Rye also became an integral part of academic literature curriculum. The book has sold more than 120 million copies worldwide to nowadays. The Catcher also inspired the early careers of writers in The New Yorker such as Phillip Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey.

In the wake of its 1950s success, Salinger received and rejectednumerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye into a film, including one from Samuel Goldwyn.Catcher’s publication made the filmmakers Billy Wilder, Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg seeking to secure the rights.

By the late 1950s, according to Ian Hamilton, Catcher had become the book adolescents had to buy.This book has been compared to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, newspapers began publishing articles about the "Catcher Cult", and the novel was banned in several countries as well as some U.S. schools. This was so because of its subject matter and what Catholic World reviewer Riley Hughes called an "excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language". Actually,there are 237 appearances of the word "goddam" in the novel, 58 of "bastard", 31 of "Chrissake" and six of "fuck".

In 1970, several high school teachers in U.S. who assigned the book were fired or forced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye "had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools".

On February 17^th1955, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a student at Radcliffe College which was the sister school of all-male Harvard. As a wedding present, he presented her with a copy of a story about the character Franny Glass, who was partially inspired by his new wife. Then the couple’s daughter Margaret is born. Family and friends call her Peggy. After a daughter, a son, Matthew Salinger was born. In the years ahead, he would enjoy a lifelong friendship with his father and fiercely protected his privacy.

On January 27, 2010, at the age of 91, J.D. Salinger passed away in New Hampshire. The world lost one of its most talented, and reclusive voices. Then, the Salinger family released a final statement from Salinger that read: I am in this world but not of it. This was the explicit fulfilment of central idea of the fourth and final stage of his Vedantic beliefs: renunciation of the world.

In 2013, the new light is shed on Salinger’s life and work. Shane Salerno and David Shields published a biography of the famed writer entitled Salinger and became a New York Times bestseller. One of its many revelations is that there are at least five unpublished works by Salinger that are scheduled to be released between 2015 and 2020. Not only this, Salerno also created a film documentary on Salinger. This documentary film debuted around the same time as his book with Shields. The Weinstein Company theatrically released and subsequently appeared as the 200th episode of the Academy- and Emmy-winning PBS series American Masters on January 21, 2014.

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Galuh Lintang♥Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen often referred to in Scandinavia as H. C. Andersen was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories, called eventyr in Danish, or "fairy-tales" in English, express themes that transcend age and nationality.

Hans Christian Andersen was born in the town of Odense, Denmark, on Tuesday, April 2, 1805. He was an only child. Andersen's father, also Hans, considered himself related to nobility. His paternal grandmother had told his father that their family had in the past belonged to a higher social class, but investigations prove these stories unfounded. Theories that Andersen may have been an illegitimate son of King Christian VII persist.

Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Little Mermaid", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Nightingale", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and many more. His stories have inspired plays, ballets, and both live-action and animated films.

All in all, he wrote about a hundred and fifty of them, and while all are not equally good – and many are really not meant for children – all of them are told in Andersen's special satirical, comical, and sympathetic voice. And all of them are in some way about Andersen himself, whose own story is at least as strange as his tales. He called his autobiography "The Fairytale of My Life," and the title is apt.

He was a solitary boy who amused himself by playing with puppets and trying to write plays. He grew up in extreme poverty and was obsessed with a desire to become famous, even if he wasn't quite sure of the path to fame. He left home at the age of fourteen, setting off for Copenhagen, the Danish capital, and he never looked back. He had the enormous good fortune to be noticed by a prosperous and socially prominent family, the Collins, who helped get him an education. Andersen considered them his family – his own father had died when Andersen was eleven, his mother was a drunk – and although he tried the Collins' patience, they stood by him, never imagining that this strange, overly sensitive and strikingly ugly young man would become world famous.

Andersen's father, who had received an elementary education, introduced Andersen to literature, reading him Arabian Nights. Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was uneducated and worked as a washerwoman following his father's death in 1816, remarrying in 1818. Andersen was sent to a local school for poor children where he received a basic education and was forced to support himself, working as a weaver's apprentice and, later, for a tailor. At 14, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having an excellent soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet. Taking the suggestion seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing.

Andersen's childhood home in Odense

Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish Theatre, felt a great affection for him, and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, persuading King Frederick VI to pay part of his education. Andersen had already published his first story, The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave, in 1822. Though not a keen student, he also attended school at Elsinore until 1827.

He later said his years in school were the darkest and most bitter of his life. At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster's home. There he was abused in order "to improve his character," he was told. He later said the faculty had discouraged him from writing in general, causing him to enter a state of depression.

A very early fairy tale by Andersen called The Tallow Candle (Danish: Tællelyset) was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012. The story, written in the 1820s, was about a candle who did not feel appreciated. It was written while he was still in school and dedicated to a benefactor, in whose family's possession it remained until it turned up among other family papers in a suitcase in a local archive.

In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with a short story titled A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager. In the book, the protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat. He followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St. Nicholas Church Tower and a short volume of poems. Though he made little progress writing and publishing immediately thereafter, in 1833 he received a small traveling grant from the King, enabling him to set out on the first of many journeys through Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle, Switzerland, he wrote the story, Agnete and the Merman. He spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante the same year, inspiring the name, The Bay of Fables. In October 1834, he arrived in Rome. Andersen's travels in Italy would be reflected in his first novel; an autobiography titled The Improvisatore (Improvisatoren) which was published in 1835, receiving instant acclaim.

In June 1847, Andersen paid his first visit to England and enjoyed a triumphal social success during the summer. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where intellectual people could meet, and it was at one party that he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda which was of much joy to Andersen. He wrote in his diary, "We had come to the veranda, I was so happy to see and speak to England's now living writer, whom I love the most."

The two authors respected each other's work and had something important in common as writers: Depictions of the poor and the underclass, who often had difficult lives affected both by the Industrial Revolution and by abject poverty. In the Victorian era there was a growing sympathy for children and an idealization of the innocence of childhood.

Ten years later, Andersen visited England again, primarily to visit Dickens. He extended a brief visit to Dickens' home at Gads Hill Place into a five-week stay, to the distress of Dickens' family. After Anderson was told to leave, Dickens stopped all correspondence between them, much to the great disappointment and confusion of Andersen, who had quite enjoyed the visit and never understood why his letters went unanswered.

Andersen's poem 'The Dying Child,' was published in a Copenhagen journal and the Royal Theatre produced in 1829 his musical drama. Phantasier og Skizzer, a collection of poems, was born when Andersen fell in love with Riborg Voigt, who was secretly engaged to the local chemist's son. "She has a lovely, pious face, quite child-like, but her eyes looker clever and thoughtful, they were brown and very vivid," Andersen remembered in The Book of My Life. Riborg married the chemists's son, Poul Bøving, in 1831. A leather pouch containing a letter from Riborg was found round Andersen's neck when he died. Also Edvard, Jonas Collin's son, and Henrik Stempe in the 1840s were for Andersen other objects of unfulfilled dreams.

"I do wish that I were dead," Andersen said to one of his friends in 1831, expressing not his feelings about his failed love for Riborg but also echoing the melancholy of Goethe's Werther from The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Andersen never met Goethe, who was still alive when Andersen made his first journey to Germany. The visit inspired the first of his many travel sketches.

From 1831 onwards Andersen travelled widely in Europe, and remained a passionate traveller all his life.He wrote sketches about Sweden, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Middle East. During his journeys Andersen met in Paris among others Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas. A Poet's Day Dreams (1853) Andersen dedicated to Charles Dickens, whom he met in the summer of 1857. And in Rome he met the young Norwegian writer Björnson. Andersen lacked sufficient command of English and after staying with Dickens at Gad's Hill, his host stuck a brief note in the guest room saying: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the family AGES!"

Love life

The Hanfstaengl portrait of Andersen dated July 1860

In Andersen's early life, his private journal records his refusal to have sexual relations.

Andersen often fell in love with unattainable women and many of his stories are interpreted as references. At one point, he wrote in his diary: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!" A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Riborg was found on Andersen's chest when he died, several decades after he first fell in love with her, and after he supposedly fell in love with others. Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin. One of his stories, The Nightingale, was a written expression of his passion for Jenny Lind, and became the inspiration for her nickname, the "Swedish Nightingale". Andersen was often shy around women and had extreme difficulty in proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to take her to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not the same; she saw him as a brother, writing to him in 1844 "farewell... God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny."

Andersen wrote to Edvard Collin: "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery." Collin, who preferred women, wrote in his own memoir: "I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering." Likewise, the infatuations of the author for the Danish dancer Harald Scharff and Carl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, did not result in any relationships.

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