It is a peculiarly American custom, perhaps, to be more interested in artists than their art; or maybe Americans have just gone further, as is their wont, gossipwise, than the Brits, say, who were more absorbed by Byron's life than his work, or the Australians, absorbed by Shane Warne's antics more than his exquisite artistry.
So Jerome David Salinger, born in seething Manhattan just after the First World War, grew more famous in American life for retreating from it, in 1953, than for his two masterpieces, The Catcher in the Rye (1948) and Nine Stories (1953).
Salinger sightings, rumors of mounds of finished but unpublished novels, memoirs by a former lover and by his daughter Margaret, sudden copyright lawsuits issuing from his refuge in the New Hampshire forest — this was what we heard of Salinger for more than half a century, as his public persona morphed from the lanky, dashing, funny war vet (he fought on D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge) who created one of the greatest voices in American literature, to a sort of woodsy Howard Hughes, reportedly an ascetic obsessed with religion, privacy, and health food behind the high fence of his rural compound.
Meanwhile The Catcher in the Rye became a classic (it sells 250,000 copies a year, and is, with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and S. L. Hinton's The Outsiders, a basic text for American teenagers) and Nine Stories became a touchstone, particularly for writers; among the authors who counted it a lodestar are Philip Roth and the late John Updike.
Writers of every age are still thrilled by Salinger's uncanny ear for the rhythm and verve of the way people speak, and for his wonderful eye for turning points of infinitesimal subtlety — the virtues of the best short fiction.
Salinger also published two collections of long linked stories about the Glass family — ex-vaudevillean parents and seven brilliant children, some of whom appear in Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters — and he was rumoured to have written vast reams more about them; a roman-fleuve, perhaps, like Patrick O'Brian's sea novels or J. K. Rowling's wizardly epics, that probably will appear some years from now to great acclaim.
A friend of mine maintains that Salinger's greatest creation was the Legend of the Forest Recluse, which protected the troubled man (he was hospitalised at the end of the war for what