Jerome David Salinger published one novel and a few collections of stories — and vanished. He moved to a house in New Hampshire, put up a high fence, and gave no interviews. He kept writing — but published nothing. He died in 2010, at ninety-one.
He was born in New York in 1919. The army, the Normandy landing, the liberation of the concentration camps. The Catcher in the Rye (1951): sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield runs away from his boarding school and drifts through New York for three days, hating "phoniness." Schools banned the book — which is precisely why everyone read it.
Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Seymour: An Introduction — stories of the Glass family, of clever children who cannot fit into the world.
Mark Chapman, who killed Lennon, was carrying The Catcher in the Rye. That is no fault of Salinger's — but he knew it.