Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 to wealthy parents in New York City. Like his main protagonist Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger attended several schools before graduating. After spending a year in Europe, he studied at Columbia University, taking a writing
course led by Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine, who became his mentor early in his writing career. Salinger was drafted into the US Army in 1942 and continued to write despite suffering from a “nervous condition.” The Catcher in the Rye thrust Salinger onto the world stage as a literary celebrity. However, he resented the attention and became reclusive and far less productive. By the time of his death in 2010, The Catcher in the Rye remained Salinger’s only full-length novel.
The Catcher in the Rye is narrated by 17-year-old Holden Caulfield. He is liberal with his parents’ money, and relentless in his commentary on the human condition, sexuality, and morality. He has little regard for authority and seems careless about his self-destructive trajectory.
But Holden Caulfield is much more than a teenage rebel. His frank admissions of deceptions, imperfections, and contradictions reveal a bemused individual who is hankering after childhood
innocence, suffering grief, and growing painfully aware of the contradictions of adult life. He is a compelling antihero—an ambivalent, vulnerable figure— who can be sensitive and witty as well as immature and vulgar. Caulfield’s casual disregard for honesty and disdain for societal norms are mitigated by a genuine confessional impulse and surprising tolerance for some of the diverse characters he encounters throughout the course of the novel. Caulfield is also an easy victim. He is bullied in his dormitory at school, and ripped off by a pimp working the elevator in the New York hotel. In his confusion about women and sex, he unconsciously seeks out kindness and familiarity. Having paid for a prostitute he asks if they can simply “talk.” He strikes up a conversation with two nuns, despite his atheism, and they insist he is “a very sweet boy.” Inevitably, Salinger’s dirty realism caused controversy. Some critics dismissed the novel as puerile and maudlin. But Salinger gained cult status in the years following its publication, further fueled by his reclusive lifestyle.
Death and grief are prevailing themes in The Catcher in the Rye. After Holden’s brother dies, he
smashes his hands in rage; his classmate is bullied and comes to a tragic end; and the very title of the book refers to stopping (catching) children running through fields before they fall off a cliff. It is likely that the loss of numerous young soldiers in World War II influenced Salinger to write this compelling first-person narrative, which remains an enduring portrait of the teenager in crisis.
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It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.
Toni Morrison is one of the America’s most powerful literary voices, and the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), among her numerous other awards. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 into a working-class Ohio family, she grew up with a love of reading, music, and folklore. She earned a BA from Howard University and an MA from Cornell. She was married for a short time to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons. Morrison wrote her first four novels while working as an editor in New York. Her fifth, Beloved, was widely acclaimed and made into a movie. From 1989 to 2006 Morrison held a professorship at Princeton University. In 2005 she wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner, an opera based on the story that inspired Beloved. She continues to write, and to
KORN- Jonathon Davis (vocals), James “Munky” Shaffer (guitar), Brian “Head” Welch (guitar), Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu (bass), David Silveria (drums). Korn are one of the most popular and respected of the nu metal wave of the early to mid-nineties, and one of the few bands from that time period that continue to produce listenable music to the present day. The band was founded in Bakersfield, California, in 1993, and their first album, Korn, established them as different from the usually more macho metal bands that formed around the same time. Lead singer Jonathan Davis writes lyrics that celebrate the loner and the misfit, providing the soundtrack and outlet for the dispossessed nerds of metal. While bands such as Limp Bizkit were singing empty anthems to misplaced anger, Korn was tying to articulate the anguish that the meekest members of the metal community go through and tried to articulate their rage, not against a nameless machine but at the very real oppressive teachers, parents, and school bullies. Surprisingly, the band, who tour and record infrequently, seem to be as popular today as they were in their nineties heyday, although drummer Silveria and guitarist Brian “Head” Welch both left the band in 2006. Welch apparently left to proselytize as a newly born again Christian. Korn remains one of the more emotional and honest
Jack Kerouac was born to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He studied at Columbia University where he met Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs who would become fellow leading lights of the beat generation. Kerouac dropped out in his second year then joined the merchant navy, before turning to writing as a profession. From 1947, he became increasingly attracted to the whisky-drinking hobo lifestyle and began his wandering across America and Mexico, often visiting various other beat writers. Those voyages across the North American landscape were relayed in his various roman à clef writings, friends’ faces only thinly veiled as protagonists. Kerouac’s alcoholism led to cirrhosis and his death in 1969.