I won’t miss J.D. Salinger, and neither will you

I finally read The Catcher in the Rye last year. I probably should have read it in high school – I was much more likely to learn from it then than I am now. Of course, the books I was actually taking my cies from then were Brave New World and Animal Farm, and they’ve had a much bigger impact on worldview than Catcher ever could.

Let me say I mean that purely from a story and character perspective. I could have learned a lot more about writing from The Catcher in the Rye than I ever could with three years of high school composition.

You probably know that author J.D. Salinger died last week. I learned about it on Twitter, from posts like this.

Salinger’s family and close friend and neighbors will no doubt miss him. But why the oh nos from the general public? Not only will you not miss him as a person – you almost certainly never met him (this guy barely did) and probably never heard, read or saw an interview with him, what with the seclusion and all – you won’t miss him as a writer: if his Wikipedia page is to be believed, his last work was published in 1965. His death did not deprive the world of forthcoming wondrous literature the way, say, David Foster Wallace’s death did (or didn’t, what with the posthumous novel).

Salinger belonged uniquely to the people he chose to surround himself with. He is their loss, and they have requested privacy, even noting there won’t be a funeral. He is clearly one who lived by the words he wrote. I hope he does have people to miss.