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 »