Tag - J.D. Salinger

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6 Famous Reclusive Authors
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Controversial Authors (Part 7)

6 Famous Reclusive Authors

Writing is a solitary activity that appeals to many people with an introverted nature, myself included. Some authors take their introversion to the extreme and become recluses.

This week’s blog post is dedicated to 6 famous reclusive authors:

 

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

(10th December 1830 – 15th May 1886)

Emily Dickinson was a prolific American poet, who penned over 1700 poems. However she had fewer than a dozen poems published during her lifetime, and it was only after her demise when younger sister Lavinia discovered her poetry that the world discovered her remarkable talents. Undoubtedly the primary reason for Dickinson’s lack of acclaim during her lifetime was her reclusive habits, which by the late 1860s’ entailed her rarely leaving the house, and speaking to visitors from the other side of her closed front door.

 

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon

(Born: 8th May 1937)

Thomas Pynchon is an American fiction and non-fiction writer.  His best known novels are The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).  Gravity’s Rainbow won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Pynchon is a notoriously private man, who refuses to give interviews and has rarely been photographed. The author did however allow his voice to be used for his two brief appearances in The Simpsons, in which he wears a paper bag over his head to hide his identity. His latest book, Bleeding Edge, was published in 2013.

 

Harper Lee

Harper Lee

(Born: 28th April 1926)

The American novelist is best known for her one and only published book, the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee is also recognized for having assisted her friend Truman Capote in writing his seminal work, In Cold Blood. Harper Lee’s reclusive behaviour has entailed refusing to give speeches, and all but disappearing from public life for four decades. The Monroeville, Alabama resident surprised many, when at the age of seventy-nine she did an interview for the New York Times. 

 

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy

(Born: 20th July 1933)

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist, screenwriter and playwright who has written 10 novels. His accolades include winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Road (2006) and the U.S. National Book Awards for All the Pretty Horses (1992).

The New Mexico resident is a notorious recluse, who once failed to show for a banquet given in his honour. As McCarthy never gave interviews the public were not even aware what the author looked like.  In 2007 the author made an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, in addition to showing up at the Academy Awards to see the film adaptation of his book, No Country For Old Men, win Best Picture. He has not been seen in public since.

 

J.D. Salinger

J D Salinger (1st January 1919 – 27th January 2010)

The reclusive J.D. Salinger was an American author, whose seminal work The Catcher in the Rye (1951) spent thirty weeks on the New York Bestseller List, and went on to sell over ten million copies worldwide. To this day the book continues to sell around a quarter of a million copies a year.

Two years after The Catcher in the Rye’s publication Salinger withdrew completely from public life. For the next half a century the author ignored journalists and fans alike, and from 1965 no longer offered his works for publication.

 

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

 (10th July 1871 – 18th November 1922) 

French novelist, essayist and critic Marcel Proust is widely considered to be one of the best authors of all time. His most famous work, À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

Proust was a society figure in his younger years, but following his father and mother’s death, and his own increasing poor health, he withdrew from public life and stayed at home. The last three years of his life were spent in his soundproofed room, sleeping during the day and working at night on his seminal work, À la recherche du temps perdu.

Controversial Authors (Part 7)

This week’s blog post sees the latest instalment of my popular Controversial Authors series. It will likely be the last. However, as you may be aware from my never-ending Bizarre Author Death series, I am partial to changing my mind, and there may be a further instalment, or possibly two at some point.

Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Circa 446 BC – 386 BC

Notable works: The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs, Lysistrata

Often referred to as ‘the father of comedy’, Aristophanes was an ancient Athenian comic playwright, whose plays are still performed to this day. Though regarded as being old fashioned and conservative, Aristophanes was also extremely controversial. Respected and feared for his comic wit, the playwright was merciless in his scathing satire of religion, politicians and poets. His victims included such influential figures as Euripides, Cleon and Socrates.

Plato, outraged by Aristophanes’ play, The Clouds, labelled it slanderous. The populist Cleon denounced his second play, The Babylonians, as being misrepresentative of the Athenian state. We can only assume any legal action Cleon may have taken was unsuccessful, as Aristophanes caricatured him relentlessly in his subsequent plays, most notably in The Knights.

Arguably Aristophanes’ most controversial work, the play Lysistrata, was written during the Peloponnesian War, a conflict the playwright was bitterly opposed to. The story is about one woman’s efforts to end the war. Having a female lead would have been considered highly controversial in male dominated Athenian society.

Over two thousand years later in 1873 Lysistrata was banned in America, due to its perceived obscene and immoral content.

 

J.D. Salinger

J D Salinger

January 1st 1919 – January 27th 2010

Notable works: The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey

The reclusive J.D. Salinger was an American author, whose seminal work The Catcher in the Rye spent thirty weeks on the New York Bestseller List, and went on to sell over ten million copies worldwide. To this day the book continues to sell around a quarter of a million copies a year.

At the time of its publication in 1951 many were concerned by what they regarded as the immorality and perversion of the book’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield. The text is replete with religious slurs, casual sex and prostitution; subject matters that were highly controversial in the conservative nineteen-fifties. One concerned parent counted two hundred and thirty-seven occurrences of the word ‘goddamn’, fifty-eight ‘bastard’s’, thirty-one ‘Chrissake’s’ and six ‘fuck’s’.

The book was later banned in some countries and in many U.S. schools.  In the nineteen-seventies several high school teachers who had assigned The Catcher in the Rye were forced to resign from their posts. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye was the most frequently censored book in America, in addition to being the second most taught (after Of Mice and Men).

Click here to read Part 6.

 

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