Remembering J. D., his lousy childhood, and all that crap...

Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenter & Seymour and Franny & Zooey are some of my favorite writing ever (J.D. Salinger, those italics were for you). By now, most inveterate readers have heard that J. D. Salinger died last week at the age of 91. Besides a pitch-perfect rendering of dialogue as we speak rather than as writers approximate it, he wrote into existence the Glasses - a family so vivid that I am sure that I knew them. I can't say I will miss reading his new works because he hadn't published one in 50 years. He was a man who loved to write but he found publishing and the attention it brought him a tremendous invasion of his privacy. Ironically, his death might finally bring us news of the Glass family or even work of a new and unimagined sort and I must say that my aching to get my hands on anything else J. D. Salinger wrote makes me feel a little guilty. Here is the New York Times's obituary as well as a rememberance of him by his neighbors in the town of Cornish, N.H.