JD Salinger died

Jerome David Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye was died yesterday at age 91 in New Hampshire. JD Salinger’s book that has sold over 60 million copies worldwide and still sells 250,000 every year, was aimed at adults but his character immediately became the quintessential anti-hero of a generation, the of adolescents growing up during the Cold War, who saw his fierce criticism against the world and morality of the fifties reflected their own concerns and anxieties.



The confrontation between the world of youth and adults also reflect the universal desire to not grow, other side of one of many American dreams and somehow that is repeated generation after generation, hence its universal success. The novel, in which Holden Caulfield recounts in the first person from a psychiatric hospital the days following his expulsion from school, became cult novel, which was taken to extremes by one of his greatest fans, Mark David Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon in 1980. Chapman came to cite the book of the writer as the place to find the explanation for that act.

Maybe part of the fascination The guardian … also due to the mystique that has surrounded its author. One of the few images of him are preserved show him in a threatening attitude against the photographer. He fled the spotlight and the media noise. Only gave an interview in 1974 to The New York Times and telephone, to defend their privacy.