Jerome David Salinger was born on New Years Day in New York in 1919. His father, Sol, was a Jew who was in the meat and cheese business. His relationship with his father was distant and he didn't even bother to attend his funeral. His mother, of whom he was very fond, was Irish Catholic. Being half Jewish was a source of enormous conflict for Salinger. Salinger attended New York public high school and was considered an average student in most subjects. Most of his teachers found him to be a shy, polite, introverted boy. He flunked out of the first private school and attended. Later, he enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy and graduated in 1936. Soon he began to write, despite his father's efforts to teach him the business of importing. After the brief periods of enrollment at both NYU and Columbia University, Salinger devoted himself entirely to writing, and by 1940 he had published several short stories in periodicals.

Salinger was drafted by the United States Army in 1942 where he specialized in counter-intelligence. In 1944 he stormed Normandy with the other allies during D-Day. Soon after returning from the war, Salinger began to isolate himself more and more from society. He married in 1955 and has two children. Salinger's continued withdrawal from society has continued and today he is virtually unknown outside of the world of literature.

The cold relationship with his father, his conflict from being half Jewish, and especially his traumatic experiences in World War II, were negative aspects of his life which shaped his personality and his fiction.

In 1946 Salinger resumed a writing career primarily for The New Yorker magazine. Some of his most notable stories include his first story for The New Yorker entitled A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948), the tale of the suicide of a despairing war veteran and For Esmé ­ With Love and Squalor (1950), which describes a U.

S. soldier's encounter with two British children. In total, Salinger published thirty-five short stories in various publications, including many in the Saturday Evening Post, Story, and Colliers between 1940 and 1948, and The New Yorker from 1948 until 1965.

Salinger received major critical and popular recognition with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the story of Holden Caulfield, a rebellious boarding school student who attempts to run away from the adult world that he finds "phony." In many ways reminiscent of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Salinger's novel finds great sympathy for its wayward child protagonist. Salinger's only novel drew from characters he had already created in two short stories published in 1945 and 1946, This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise and I'm Crazy. The latter story is an alternate take on several of the chapters in The Catcher in the Rye.

Salinger followed The Catcher in the Rye with Nine Stories (1953), a selection of his best literary work, and Franny and Zooey in 1961, which draws from two earlier stories in The New Yorker. In 1963 he published several of his short stories as a novel, Raise the High Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. His relatively small literary output and reclusive habits since that time has made Salinger the subject of a great deal of notoriety.

Since 1953, Salinger has resided in Cornish, New Hampshire, and claims that he continues to write. Although details about Salinger are notoriously vague because of his reclusive nature, which has made him the subject of a great deal of speculation. Salinger refuses to give interviews or to deal with the press. Personal information about Salinger is therefore limited but in great demand. Letters written by Salinger to a young woman with whom he had an affair gained a $156,000 auction price at Sotheby's.

Main subjects of his works are alienation, isolation and suicide.