“All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.”
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Normally I would bring you Happy Friday on the last day of the working week, but today I’d like to pay tribute to J.D. Salinger who died on Wednesday.
Here is what the New York Times had to say:
“Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
I don’t pretend to be a literary expert, but I love reading and books. I am named after Phoebe Caulfied, Holden’s younger sister and the book has had a long lasting influence on my life.
R.I.P, J.D. Salinger.
‘It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.’
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye