Posted on 01/28/2010 9:47:54 PM PST by Lancey Howard
(snip)
In the spring of 1942, a few months after America had been drawn into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the US Army, where he was to serve until demobilisation in 1946. After training he was posted to the 12th Infantry Regiment in the Fourth Infantry Division of the US Army — most of the time as a staff sergeant — through five campaigns. As the build-up of American forces in Britain developed apace with the preparations for the Allied invasion of occupied Europe, he was stationed in England, at Tiverton, Devon, and he was among those who landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
He saw service throughout the Allied advance through North West Europe, notably during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45. He was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit in which he interrogated German prisoners. His wartime experiences, which included witnessing the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, affected him deeply. He later told his daughter: “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils — no matter how long you live.”
One of the personal benefits of the war was that Salinger met Ernest Hemingway, a writer he much admired, who was working as a war correspondent in Paris. He found Hemingway to be utterly unlike the rough, tough, brusque, outdoors, literary lion he was expecting and shyly mentioned to him a story Slight Rebellion in Manhattan, which he had written in 1941 and offered to The New Yorker.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Did he kick the bucket?
(( ping ))
Salinger certainly led an interesting life, and apparently served quite honorably in the army during WWII. If he was a literary “one-hit wonder”, then it was by his own choice. ..And what a hit it was.
I also found it interesting that Salinger attended Valley Forge Military Academy for 2 years and attended Ursinus College. These are places fairly local to my area.
Man. I thought he had passed on a long time ago.
Yep. Died Wednesday at home, age 91.
My favorite book. I wonder if Salinger kept writing, just for himself. I can’t imagine “peaking” at 32 and not working in any great capacity for 60 years.
Looking back, I wonder why. At the time I thought it was very cutting edge and avant guarde. Sort of like the movie, Rebel Without a Cause.
Today...not so much. It was simply a revelation of what we all learn. (Oh my gosh...I have become a geezer!!!)
My seniors read “The Catcher in the Rye” for their English class. It perfectly captures the sort of manic, shallow enthusiasm of being a teenager, and that hasn’t changed at all since 1951 (or probably since the late Stone Age).
In a way, I can understand what he did. Someone told me once that we can go back and fix a bad first impression, but our last impression is the one that sticks. To prove it, he asked me what I remembered about John Belushi. And to prove it again, I just asked my 11-year-old son (sitting next to me playing “World of Warcraft”) what he remembered about Elvis. “He was fat and he had sideburns,” is the answer. Not exactly “Heartbreak Hotel.”
So Salinger wrote a great book and decided to leave on a positive note. He has consistently taught generations of kids; at least the ones in my class are obligated to think about dealing with the death of a loved one, growing up, and coming to grips with the pain (and joy) of living. Not bad. Rest in peace.
Catcher in the Rye is the only Salinger novel I’ve read, but I thought it was fantastic. It’s one of those books where I had to read it from beginning to end in one sitting, because I didn’t want to put it down.
I thought Salinger was was quite well-known for actually writing what JFK claimed as his “Profiles in Courage” —— and was revered (behind the scenes) by the Washington establishment for pulling that charade off to get Kennedy elected.
Very interesting life indeed. He was at the landings at Utah Beach and witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps.
I just remembered Family Guy when Quagmire of all people, finally blasted Brian for being a “textbook liberal” and stating that Caulfield wasn’t a “deep person” but a “spoiled brat”.
yes. He passed on sadly.
Appears so.
We'll have to wait to see his cradle-rob's take.
Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
Appears so.
We'll have to wait to see his cradle-rob's take.
Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
This from
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2478/did-john-f-kennedy-really-write-profiles-in-courage
“
Did John F. Kennedy really write “Profiles in Courage?”
November 7, 2003
Dear Cecil:
Did John F. Kennedy really write Profiles in Courage? I read that there were rumors at the time of its publication that it had been ghostwritten, and that the Kennedy family later conceded as much. Recently I visited Amazon.com and was surprised to see online reviews posted by readers praising the president for his fine writing. Is there any consensus about Profiles in Courage and who the real author is?
— Kevin West, Los Angeles
Dear Kevin:
Yes, there's a consensus about Profiles in Courage (1956), which established JFK's intellectual credentials and helped make him a credible presidential candidate. We'll get to that. Yes, we know who did most of the heavy lifting for the book — we'll get to that too. The principal controversy, apparently, has been what to call the curious process by which the book came to be. Even Garry Wills, a Kennedy critic, writes that JFK was the author of the book in the sense that he “authorized” it. Come now. Kennedy conceived the book and supervised its production, but did little of the research and writing. If you or I were discovered doing the same for a sophomore term paper in sociology, we'd get an F.
The idea for the book — a study of heroic U.S. senators — came to Kennedy in 1954, when he was a first-term senator himself. Initially he imagined it as a magazine article, but during a long convalescence after a couple back operations he decided to make it into a book. His chief assistant on the project was his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, often described as his alter ego. (Remember the bit about “Ask not what your country can do for you”? Sorensen was in on that one.) The recuperating Kennedy sent Sorensen a steady stream of notes and dictation, requested books, asked that memos be prepared, and so on. Sorensen worked virtually full-time on the project for six months, sometimes 12 hours a day. He coordinated the work and drafted many chapters. Others also made contributions, most importantly Georgetown University history professor Jules Davids.
The book was published on January 1, 1956, to lavish praise. It became a best seller and in 1957 was awarded the Pulitzer prize for biography. It established Kennedy, till then considered promising but lacking in gravitas, as one of the Democratic party's leading lights, setting the stage for his presidential nomination in 1960.
But doubts about the book's authorship surfaced early. In December 1957 syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, interviewed on TV by Mike Wallace, said, “Jack Kennedy is … the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him.” Outraged, Kennedy hired lawyer Clark Clifford, who collected the senator's handwritten notes and rounded up statements from people who said they'd seen him working on the book, then persuaded Wallace's bosses at ABC to read a retraction on the air.
Kennedy made no secret of Sorensen's involvement in Profiles, crediting him in the preface as “my research associate,” and likewise acknowledged the contributions of Davids and others. But he insisted that he was the book's author and bristled even at teasing suggestions to the contrary. Sorensen and other Kennedy loyalists backed him up then and have done so since.
The most thorough analysis of who did what has come from historian Herbert Parmet in Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (1980). Parmet interviewed the participants and reviewed a crateful of papers in the Kennedy Library. He found that Kennedy contributed some notes, mostly on John Quincy Adams, but little that made it into the finished product. “There is no evidence of a Kennedy draft for the overwhelming bulk of the book,” Parmet writes. While “the choices, message, and tone of the volume are unmistakably Kennedy's,” the actual work was “left to committee labor.” The “literary craftsmanship [was] clearly Sorensen's, and he gave the book both the drama and flow that made for readability.” Parmet, like everyone else, shrinks from saying Sorensen was the book's ghostwriter, but clearly he was.
On a related subject, did JFK's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, twist arms to get his son the Pulitzer, as some believe? Parmet finds no smoking gun. True, Profiles wasn't among the books recommended to the Pulitzer committee by its judges, a pair of expert reviewers, so when the rather slim volume came out of nowhere and trumped some seriously weighty scholarship, people got suspicious. (Supposedly Profiles won because someone on the committee said his 12-year-old grandson liked it.) New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a friend of Joe Kennedy's, boasted that he had lobbied hard for the book, but Krock’s partisanship was well known and the committee members were distinguished newspaper folk, not easily swayed. Parmet harrumphs that it would have been unlike Joe P. to let an opportunity slip, but who knows? We do know this: JFK, not for the first or last time, got credit he didn't deserve.
— Cecil Adams
I wasn’t particularly enthralled with Catcher in the Rye, but my english teacher was.
I think they used to require some of the most obscure literature ..
...Because it's the only novel he wrote.
That would be Ted Sorensen (also late), not Salinger. Salinger was a novelist, not a historian. Sorensen played a historian in real life.
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