“Catcher in the Rye” author J.D. Salinger, who disappeared and stayed that way after becoming known as the seminal author of adolescent angst and alienation in the 1950s and early ’60s, has died at age 91.
You could almost argue that Salinger played an unwitting, tangential and nonsensical part in the murder of John Lennon. You can’t argue that and actually mean it, of course, because it’s fundamentally absurd. But as John Guare wrote in Six Degres of Separation, “Catcher” proved to be a seminal tome for more than one malignant malcontent.
