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. 

Bostonist co-editor Kerry Skemp writes:

I found out about J.D. Salinger’s death in that least Salingerian of forms: the Facebook status update. Discovering the death of a beloved but notably reclusive author of classic books through an always-changing, often-inane website was jarring, but not necessarily surprising: just the day before, another friend’s status update had alerted me of Howard Zinn’s passing. I was saddened by these deaths, but reassured, in a way, to know that others cared about these men too, that I was in a community of concerned individuals who wanted to carry on the legacy of these men. This saved me the responsibility of mourning alone, of living up to their legacy. I wasn’t alone. But was Salinger?

My first impulse after reading that status update was to run home and hug my copies of Salinger’s books—to make sure that they were okay, that they wouldn’t disappear in the wake of their author’s death. I continued, though, to feel strange about the disconnect between the painstakingly crafted, long-lasting works of a notoriously solitary author, and the ephemeral nature... more »

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... more »

  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. 

Claire Blechman writes: 

When I lived in New York, I was friends with a girl who worked at Harold Ober Associates, J.D. Salinger’s literary agency. We asked her one night (over Arepas at a tiny restaurant in the Village) what it was like on the inside. She told us the agency received bags and bags of fanmail for Salinger, which languished unopened in the office.  

 There was in fact a specific list of instructions on how to deal with Salinger-related issues. Most were variations on a theme: don’t ask, don’t tell. His address was a state secret: only two people in the whole agency knew it. The only mail he ever received from them was residual checks.

 “J.D. Salinger hates you,” she said. Me, and you, and everyone you know.

 I decided to read Catcher in the Rye my senior year of college. I was lifeguarding with a particularly vacant muscle-head from the lacrosse team who went by his last name: Pearl. I asked Pearl what the last book he read was. “Catcher in the Rye,” he said. It was his... more »

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.

Ashley Peterson eulogizes J.D. in her own words:

The first Salinger enthusiast I knew, which is to say, the first person I knew who read beyond Catcher in the Rye, was Sarah Worden.  We met in eighth grade drama class, shared a love of Dum Dum lollipops, and by twelfth grade were best friends.

By college I too had read past Catcher, and one summer decided to read even beyond what Salinger had allowed Little, Brown to provide.  Blissfully and thankfully unaware of the possibilities of interlibrary loan, a friend and I traveled to a handful of Virginia college libraries chasing copies of stories from McCalls, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker.  We came close to catching them all, I believe.

Last Thursday, I went home and read the first half of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.”    Is there a more comforting literary presence than Muriel Fedder’s father’s uncle, the tiny man in the silk top hat?  With his cigar, his broad smile, and his outsized farewell gestures buoying the rumpled Buddy Glass he called... more »

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.

Today, Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,  remembers what it was like to read Salinger as a teenager and as an adult:

Growing up, I was a decidedly non-literary child—the kind who had to be routinely prodded to complete assigned readings for school—but that began to change when I encountered J.D. Salinger, the first writer I fell in love with on my own volition. Like many others, I felt an immediate kinship with Catcher in the Rye. At the time, I felt as though the book, with its brilliant exploration of coming-of-age angst and loneliness, had been written for me; I longed to be like Holden, a see-er of the truth in a world populated by phonies—which is, I suppose, as good a reason as any to become a writer.

When I revisited Catcher in the Rye in later years, my view of Holden grew more nuanced. I could see that he was unreliable, at once see-er of the truth and also in the grips of a kind of blindness. And... more »

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.

Today, Vernacular editor Alexis Hauk reminisces about the recluse:

I admit, I hadn’t cracked a Salinger novel since early college when, on a trip to Italy the summer after freshman year of college, I poured all that over-privileged “existential longing” of mine into Franny and Zooey. Those two months from Milan to Palermo in a bus were some of the sweatiest, most alcohol-drenched of my life. And I often wonder if, had we all had not been in such a perpetually hungover, dunder-headed, 19-year-old haze for so much of the trip: would we have admired and appreciated the Pantheon a little more?  Or Pirandello’s grave?  Or the head of St. Catherine?

Just as I wonder about that trip, I sometimes question if—by reading his first and seminal work, Catcher in the Rye, as an adolescent—Salinger’s skill as a writer was completely lost on me, unfairly relegated to a “juvenile” classification early on.  Eudora Welty, no slouch herself, called Salinger’s writing “original, first-rate, serious and beautiful.”  But all I really remember is how I could, like, totally relate. With sober... more »

 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 contributor Justine Tal Goldberg writes: 

  J.D. Salinger was my first love. He came to me in high school, between assigned readings of Shakespeare, Hemingway and Camus, and long before those other literary giants of college—Joyce, Faulkner and Yeats. These authors stole my heart, passing my affections between them like the college boys I dated, but Salinger stayed by my side. He was a good friend among acquaintances, a relationship among flings, and the voice of reason when my own characters threatened to lie.

              As a teenager, I appreciated Salinger’s honesty, his self-deluded characters who through seamless narrative are revealed for the phonies they are. (Can you blame me? It was high school after all.) As a young woman, I was deeply moved by his faith in childhood, his authorial finger trained on the grown-ups, those poor folks utterly devoid of magic. Now, I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t thought about Salinger much until yesterday, of course, when I learned of his death and sat down to reflect upon his life.

              Is it trite to say that I feel like I’ve lost a loved one, an ex with whom I’ve fallen out of touch but still care for in... more »