It's been so long since JD Salinger published anything that it's surprising to realize he's still around and celebrating birthdays - his 90th on New Year's Day.
But for a writer whose last published work was in 1965, Jerome David Salinger's fame has hardly faded. His most famous work, Catcher in the Rye, which foreshadowed the youth rebellion of the 1960s, has remained in print since it first appeared in 1951.
As early as 1944, Ernest Hemingway recognized Salinger as having a "helluva talent." The two met in Europe during World War II, where Salinger served in the US Army.
Salinger's most famous character was Holden Caulfield, the foul- mouthed 16-year-old prep school reject who rebelled against the hypocrisy of adulthood. Caulfield, who has been compared to Johann Wolfgang van Goethe's Werther, first appeared in 1946 in a short story in the elite New Yorker magazine, under the title Slight Rebellion off Madison, and then was fleshed out in Catcher in the Rye - Salinger's only novel.
Salinger's last published work appeared 43 years ago in the New Yorker, a novella Hapworth 16, 1924, part of his series on the Glass family.
But the Glass series remains unfinished, and whatever might be going on in his life as he turns 90 remains a closely held secret.
Repelled by the demands of almost cult-like fame that came with Catcher and his successive works - Nine Stories in 1953 and Franny and Zooey in 1961 - Salinger retreated into an isolated life behind a high fence in Cornish, a small village in the hills of New Hampshire in the US north-east.
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