We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work.

Fringe Editor-in-Chief Lizzie Stark writes:

For me, Catcher in the Rye represents two major touchstones of my literary life. The first was the spring break of my sophomore year in high school, when it became the first required reading book I had ever liked. As a student at a private all-girls school, I felt that I understood Holden’s beef with the phonies, and as a teen girl, like all teen girls, who felt inept at fitting in, I related to his outsider status. I  picked up Franny and Zooey and found myself unsuccessfully trying to utter the proverbial “OM”, as if it had the power to shock me out of teenage malaise. The small format of the books, their plain white,  slightly bumpy covers made me feel like I was reading something important, ancient, adult.

Years later, during the summer after my sophomore year of college, I read Catcher again on a trip to West Africa to visit my cousin in the Peace Corps. I’d made a tactical error in bringing a book about privileged white boys to one of the world’s poorest countries — Mali. Besides a collection of Hemingway short stories, it was all I had, so I read it during a five-day riverboat trip up the Niger River to Timbuktu.

I was sitting on a 30-foot long and 10-foot wide canoe-shaped barge with about 20 other people. We sat on tops of sacks of millet and sugar, which lay on top of gasoline barrels on top of steel rods for reinforcing concrete. We ate dried fish with black mustard sauce and rice, prepared with river water on a small coal brazier, three meals a day, every day. The bilge boy drank river water straight from the cut-open plastic milk jugs he used to bail out the boat.

Holden Caulfield’s problems suddenly seemed small and petty, completely divorced from my own current experience. Poor white boy got kicked out of private school? Cry me a freaking river. I closed the book and kept my eyes open for the rest of the trip, coming to terms with the inanity of my teen angst.