http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/28/catcher-in-rye-salinger-dies E-asy Peasy?

From the Guardian:




The novelist JD Salinger, whose name has been a byword for authorial reticence ever since he withdrew from public life in the 1960s, has died today at his home in New Hampshire. He was 91.
JD Salinger JD Salinger, photographed in 1951. Photograph: /AP

His literary reputation rests on a handful of works published in the 1950s and 60s – including his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and a series of short stories about a dysfunctional fictional family, the Glasses, that charted in laconic, slangy style the struggles of disaffected, talented young people as they grappled with the great questions of life and death.

Salinger stopped publishing in 1965 and retreated to a farmhouse in Cornish, New Hampshire. However, rumours of eccentric habits and unpublished manuscripts made him more famous as a recluse than he had ever been as an author.

Born in a fashionable part of Manhattan on 1 January 1919, Salinger had a schooling that echoed his most famous creation, Holden Caulfield, with the writer asked to leave a New York prep school because of poor grades. He went on to study creative writing at New York's Columbia University before being drafted into the US army in 1942, serving with a unit that saw heavy fighting as it carved its way from the D-day landings to Berlin, losing more men along the way than it had started out with. The experience, according to his daughter Margaret, formed a reference point around which family life was constructed. "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely," he once told her, "no matter how long you live."

Among the bullets, Salinger found time to write the short stories he had begun to publish in magazines such as Story, Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post. Many of these early stories prefigured his later work, with lonely young soldiers, girls with "lovely, awkward" smiles, and children waiting for post that never comes. Later in his career he refused to allow them to be republished, dismissing them as the product of a time when he was writing feverishly, "intent on placing [stories] in magazines".

It was with the publication in 1948 of his story A Perfect Day for Bananafish – a casual account of the last day of a former soldier's Florida beach holiday, recounted mostly in dialogue and finishing with a sudden suicide – that Salinger found his mature voice and established himself as a writer, signing a first-look contract with the New Yorker. It was the first appearance of Seymour Glass, the oldest and most troubled of seven gifted siblings whose search for meaning amid the hypocrisy of their comfortable, middle-class world formed the axis around which much of Salinger's later work revolved.

The publication of The Catcher in the Rye moved Salinger's career into a new phase, though the writer was not there to witness the sensation that accompanied it, preferring to spend the summer of 1951 in Britain so as to avoid the inconvenience of interviews, public appearances and reviews.

Opening with the arresting line "If you really want to View complete news item

Purported recent picture of Salinger from New York post.

He will, Sulcus. The Catcher in the Rye isn't the kind of book you forget.

E-asy Peasy?