The Reclusive JD Salinger

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2016

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It is 65 years since the publication of JD Salinger's classic novel The Catcher in the Rye. But as the book's fame grew, Salinger himself became more and more reclusive, eventually ceasing publishing altogether. Witness hears the story of how, more than 30 years later, a professor of American literature, Roger Lathbury, almost convinced the great man to change his mind.

(Photo: JD Salinger in 1951, five years before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. Credit: Little, Brown & Co/AP)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service.
0:04.0	It's 65 years since the publication of J.D. Salinger's classic novel, The Catcher in the Rye.
0:10.0	A study of teenage rebellion, the book became one of the best-loved and most controversial
0:14.4	American novels of the 20th century. But as its fame grew, Salinger himself became more and more
0:21.2	reclusive, eventually ceasing publishing altogether.
0:25.0	I'm Louisa Dargo, and I've been talking to one American publisher
0:29.0	who almost convinced the great writer to change his mind. The cat's are going to The Catcher in the Rye and to a lesser extent some of the other books changed people's lives.
0:47.0	It gave them a voice, it told them what they were thinking, it articulated ideas that perhaps they couldn't articulate, and it started
0:55.3	many people on the road to reading other books as it did me.
1:01.5	The catch read the rye is the story of Holden Corfield, a teenager newly expelled from school
1:06.8	and America's best known truant since Huckleberry Finn.
1:10.1	Roger Lathbury was 14 when he first read the book and he became not just a reader but a professor of American literature and a small time publisher.
1:19.0	And it was in this capacity in 1996 that he met the creator of his adolescent hero the recluse J.D. Salinger.
1:27.0	The Catcher in the Rye had been published in the summer of 1951. By then Salinger already
1:36.7	had a reputation as a great writer and publishers cued to publish him. There were some dissenters, the Christian Science Monitor, for example, called
1:45.3	it immoral and perverse, but Salinger's book spoke to the new generation in a way that no book
1:51.6	had before and few have since.
1:54.0	Holden Coffield, the narrator, feels the kind of alienation and angst that adolescence very easily felt in the stodgy very conventional 50s.
2:07.0	Holden Coffields alienated and isolated and unlike all those good wholesome shows on television, he's fairly scabrous.
2:14.8	He says the G word, a six letter G word, constantly throughout the book, and this gives the book
2:21.3	a kind of hypercharged energy.
2:24.0	Holden Coffield has all of the wholesale rejection of the conventional world.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.