Salinger died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., his son Matthew said in a statement released by the author's literary representative.
Perhaps no other writer of so few works generated as much popular and critical interest as Salinger, who published one novel, three authorized collections of short stories and an additional 21 stories that only appeared in magazines in the 1940s. He abandoned publishing in 1965, when his last story -- “Hapworth 26, 1924" -- was published by the New Yorker. Rarely seen in public and aggressively averse to most publicity, he was often called the Howard Hughes of American letters.
His silence inspired a range of reactions from literary critics, some characterizing it as a form of cowardice and others as a cunning strategy that, despite its outward intentions, helped preserve his mythic status in American culture. Still others interpreted his withdrawal as the deliberate spiritual stance of a man who, shying from the glare of celebrity, immersed himself in Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Hindu Vedantic philosophy.
His stories -- heavily autobiographical, humorous and cynical -- focused on highly idiosyncratic urban characters seeking meaning in a world transformed by the horrors of World War II, in which Salinger was a direct participant.
His stellar fictional creation was Holden Caulfield, the teenage anti-hero of “The Catcher in the Rye," who was, like Salinger, unsuccessful in school and inclined to retreat from a world he perceived as disingenuous and hostile to his needs.
A prototypical misfit, Caulfield apparently became a fixation for the criminally disturbed, including Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Reagan. But Caulfield also cared about children and other innocents, exhibiting moral outrage and a compassion for underdogs that resonated with the generation that came of age in the 1960s.
When renowned psychiatrist Robert Coles lived among civil rights activists in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “scarcely a day went by that Salinger's name wasn't mentioned," he recalled in an article for the New Republic almost two decades later. Tom Hayden, the former '60s radical and California legislator who read “Catcher" as a teenager, called Caulfield one of several “alternative cultural models," along with novelists Jack Kerouac and actor James Dean, whose life crises “spawned not only political activism, but also the cultural revolution of rock 'n' roll."
J.D. Salinger, Reclusive Author of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' Dies
J.D. Salinger, one of contemporary literature's most famous recluses, who created a lasting symbol of adolescent discontent in his 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye," has died. He was 91.
