J.D. Salinger dies at 91:The hermit crab of American letters

[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/SHOWBIZ/books/01/28/salinger.obit/story.salinger.gi.jpg caption="American novelist and short story writer J D Salinger, author of The Catcher In The Rye, died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010. He was 91." width=300 height=169]

Richard Lacayo
Time

Take the austere little paperbacks down from the shelf and you can hold the collected works of J.D. Salinger — one novel, three volumes of stories — in the palm of one hand. Like some of his favorite writers — like Sappho, whom we know only from ancient fragments, or the Japanese poets who crafted 17-syllable haikus — Salinger was an author whose large reputation pivots on very little. The first of his published stories that he thought were good enough to preserve between covers appeared in the New Yorker in 1948. Sixteen years later he placed one last story there and drew down the shades.

From that day until his death at 91, Salinger was the hermit crab of American letters. When he emerged, it was usually to complain that somebody was poking at his shell. Over time Salinger's exemplary refusal of his own fame may turn out to be as important as his fiction. In the 1960s he retreated to a small house in Cornish, N.H., and rejected the idea of being a public figure. Thomas Pynchon is his obvious successor in that department. But Pynchon figured out how to turn his back on the world with a wink and a Cheshire Cat smile. Salinger did it with a scowl. Then again, he was inventing the idea, and he bent over it with an inventor's sweaty intensity.

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