“'Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.”The literary world lost a great icon today. J. D. Salinger, author of Catcher in Rye and Nine Stories, died of natural causes today at the age of 91. You can read about him and his life here, or read our reviews of his work here.
R.I.P. Mr. Salinger.
5 comments:
Great writer and even better hider.
Truly sad. I was going to find a good excerpt by which to honor him but all my Salinger is at school.
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do you start missing everybody.
I found this too:
"Salinger's Catcher in the Rye... expresses so completely what I have tried to say: a youth, father to what will, must someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who (he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it) because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there."
- William Faulkner
A lot of the post-mortems I've read are bad, but Slate has a good one by, of all people, Troy Patterson, its television critic:
http://www.slate.com/id/2242991/
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