Most Charismatic #7: J. D. Salinger

 

ALL-TIME AMERICAN WRITERS TOURNAMENT

IT’S A TRIBUTE to the charisma of J. D. Salinger that he became an iconic literary figure despite ceasing to publish while vanishing from view for several decades. The disappearance fit with the personality revealed in his works. His mystery enhanced his reputation. And really, everything about Catcher in the Rye and the stories and books about the Glass family could’ve been designed to create the impression of a compelling personality standing above and behind the work. No writer– especially in Catcher– has been so dependent on, or benefited more from, the uniqueness of voice.

J. D. Salinger is Most Charismatic American Writer #7.

NEXT:  Most Charismatic #6.
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Writers Tournament: #7 Seeds

ALL-TIME AMERICAN WRITERS TOURNAMENT

(Stephen Crane.)
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Our latest entrants into the big event:

A.)  Stephen Crane.

For pure writing talent, few American writers match the author of The Red Badge of Courage, “The Open Boat,” and other classics. Decades before Hemingway, Crane saw writing visually, like a painting. His works are expressionist explosions of color and emotion.

(Art: “Evening Sun” by Otto Dix.)

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B.)  Carl Sandburg.

Sandburg’s poetry reflected his home base of Chicago: rough-hewn, proletarian, and real. A voice of the Great Depression of the Thirties. An American cultural giant in the Fifties. Thoroughly populist, his clear-but-strong poems were accessible to everyone.

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C.)  J.D. Salinger.

He’s most widely known for his assigned-in-high school study of adolescence, Catcher in the Rye. But his best work is Nine Stories— nine well-crafted modernist gems of fiction synthesizing those twin pillars of American literature, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. One of the jewels contains the best short story title ever: “For Esme with Love and Squalor.”

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D.)  Kenneth Rexroth.

A forerunner of, and large influence on, the Beats, this San Francisco poet’s uncompromising work was more accomplished. Would Ginsberg’s “Howl” have been possible without the example of Rexroth’s powerful masterpiece, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”?

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