JD Salinger is the greatest American writer of all time. No others compare

JD Salinger is the greatest American writer of all time. No others compare.

What Twain and Faulkner did for the South, Salinger did for the North. Holden's narration was at least as innovative in American literature as Huck's narration and the plethora of narrations from TSATF & AILD.

>inb4 Faulkner was more prolific
>inb4 Twain & Faulkner were wiser about America

Don't forget all of Salinger's short stories and the vein of the Glass family running through them, and his love of including things like notebooks and letters (Phoebe's, Franny's, Esme's (all written by women --- something Faulkner & Twain could never do with success) etc…)

As for wisdom, Twain never went beyond satire and skepticism, and got along well with the same rich people he satirized since he was famous in his lifetime. Faulkner stopped at the homely superstition, simplicity, and religion of black folks and outsiders. Salinger advocated complete religious/psychological detachment from the world and only attaching yourself to the young and innocent in order to protect them. And unlike Twain and Faulkner, he actually saw war. (Faulkner was too short to join the American army).

>inb4 "what about---"
There's no other candidates besides Twain, Faulkner, or Salinger. Sorry. Even if you bring them up, I'll still be able to clearly tell you how Salinger bests them.

One example of Salinger's depths:
According to medical science, a vitamin B-12 deficiency or problems with your pituitary or thyroid gland can cause premature graying of the hair that’s reversible if the problem is corrected.

>It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head--the right side-- is full of millions of gray hairs. I've had them ever since I was a kid.
>But this damn article I started reading made me feel almost worse. It was all about hormones. It described how you should look, your face and eyes and all, if your hormones were in good shape, and I didn't look that way at all. I looked exactly like the guy in the article with lousy hormones. So I started getting worried about my hormones.

Here are some famous author's opinions on Salinger:

Samuel Beckett on The Catcher in The Rye: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

Vladimir Nabokov: "Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years."

William Faulkner: “Let me repeat. I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will—must—someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who—he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.”"

Ernest Hemingway: "Hemingway, on the other hand, is happy to name Salinger one of his three favorite contemporary authors; when he dies, a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” is found in his library. "

Phillip Roth: The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.” Roth also has "The Cather in the Rye" listed as one of his 15 favorite novels.

Haruki Murakami on The Catcher in The Rye: "I was constantly astonished by how good it all was. I was just impressed, you know, and kept thinking “so it was this great all along”. I’m a novelist too, but I couldn’t write a work like this. Definitely not."

Please tell me about how he is better than Fitzgerald, thanks

In his novella 'Seymour: An Introduction', Salinger describes Vincent Van Gogh, Soren Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka (as well as his own character, Seymour) as "the four variously notorious Sick Men", four people he turns to when he wants "perfectly credible information about modern artistic processes".

All these men were great artists (either prolific writers or painters). According to Buddy, they were also "sick" in one way or another.

What did he mean by this?

I don't know if he's the greatest of all time, you also don't mention some big names like Melville for instance, but I will agree most criticisms of him seem to be criticisms of Holden.
A Perfect Day for Bananafish is one of the greatest short stories of all time imo.

Dr. Seuss is the greatest American writer of all time. No others compare.

What Salinger and Faulkner did for teenagers, Dr. Seuss did for children. Oh the Places You'll Go's narration was at least as innovative in American literature as Holden's narration and the plethora of narrations from TSATF & AILD.

>inb4 Faulkner was more prolific
>inb4 Salinger & Faulkner were wiser about American minds

Don't forget all of Dr. Seuss's short stories and the vein of the quirky characters running through them, and his love of including things like analogies and morals (Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, The Cat in the Hat (all spoken by talking animals --- something Faulkner & Salinger could never do with success) etc…)

As for wisdom, Salinger never went beyond whiny teenagers and misanthropy, and got along well with the same posers he complained about, since he was a faggot in his lifetime. Faulkner stopped at the homely superstition, simplicity, and religion of black folks and outsiders. Dr. Seuss advocated complete immersiom into imagination from the real world and only attaching yourself to fellow people in order to help them. And unlike Salinger and Faulkner, he actually was a Captain in war. (Faulkner was too short to join the American army).

>inb4 "what about---"
There's no other candidates besides Dr. Seuss, Twain, Faulkner, or Salinger. Sorry. Even if you bring them up, I'll still be able to clearly tell you how Dr. Seuss bests them.

One example of Dr. Seuss's depths:
According to medical science, a case of oral cancer around the time he lived and died was most definitely irrevirsible. During his life he embraced fantasy and perhaps it helped him cope with the pain of cancer.

>Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.

T.H. Houghton is the greatest American writer. His novel, Time Flies Tomorrow, is a masterpiece.

I had heard that he had secretly written another novel, called The Chameleon's Song. The way he modulated into the second person narrative during the flashback scene beggared anything Faulkner attempted. The way he so skilfully mirrored the structure of Dante's "Divine Comedy" was inspired. From the inferno of the bordello, which had exactly nine rooms, to the purgatory of the assembly line and finally to the paradise of the farm.

Truly a reclusive genius.

A sensationalist thread to be sure - but OP I appreciate your commitment to Salinger. He is really, really, very good. Not talked about enough. And he definitely doesn’t seem as vain as the others. He writes just enough to make it clear. I so admire that.

John Green is the greatest American writer of all time. No others compare.

What Twain and Faulkner did for adults with functioning brains, Green did for retarded teenagers. Augustus's narration was at least as innovative in American literature as Huck's narration and the plethora of narrations from TSATF & AILD.

>inb4 Faulkner was more prolific
>inb4 Twain & Faulkner were wiser about America

Don't forget all of Green's short stories and the vein of horny teenagers running through them, and his love of including things like cancer and awkwardness (Hazel's, Daisy's, Aza's (all written by women --- something Faulkner & Twain could never do with success) etc…)

As for wisdom, Twain never went beyond satire and skepticism, and got along well with the same rich people he satirized since he was famous in his lifetime. Faulkner stopped at the homely superstition, simplicity, and religion of black folks and outsiders. Green advocated complete psychological detachment from reality and only attaching yourself to the young and innocent in order to fuck them. And unlike Twain and Faulkner, he actually saw a documentary about war. (Faulkner was too short to join the American army).

>inb4 "what about---"
There's no other candidates besides Twain, Faulkner, or Green. Sorry. Even if you bring them up, I'll still be able to clearly tell you how Green bests them.

One example of Green's depths:
According to Google, he has a tumblr account which makes posts that users like to edit, so they share with the world his love of penis.

> NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW
>10,000 notes, so I guess I should comment.
>On tumblr it’s really easy to make it look like people wrote things they did not write. (Needless to say, I did not write the above text.)
>I find false attribution annoying in general, but here’s what I find particularly offensive about this post.
>I get that I’m not the sort of person who seems likely to register a public opinion on the smell of balls, so I understand the joke in associating me with these words. But there’s something else going on here: The editor here is trying to shame me by saying that I like to give oral sex to people with penises. But that’s NOT SHAMEFUL–there’s nothing wrong with people who like to give oral sex to people with penises.
>So I just want to say to anyone who saw this post and may have felt like their sexuality was being used as a way to humiliate me: I’m not humiliated, and you needn’t be either. The only person who should be embarrassed here is the author, who has a lot to learn about how to insult someone.

I think Catcher in the Rye is overrated but I love his short stories

Salinger's fine, but he's essentially just an extension of Twain, and comparing Holden's voice to Huck's or any of Faulkner's far deeper and more comprehensive voices is absurd. Not to mention James and Hawthorne. Nabokov thought Herbert Gold was the shit, too.

I don't think Salinger aspired to be compared to someone like Faulkner, so I think it's moot to compare them, really.

Still, Salinger is exactly the kind of author who I wish I could write like. Clear, concise (okay, less so his late stuff) and poignant. The accessibility makes him come across as entry level, but it's so well crafted.

Forced meme, Salinger is repetive, boring, and unrealistic. To say you wish to emulate him is to demonstrate a complete inability to critique writing. There are hundreds of thousands of better American writers. Shit thread is amusing, though.

Melville is indisputably the greatest American writer

>Hundreds of thousands
>American authors
You really have no understanding of literature’s history, do you?

Salinger's a good writer but he's not that deep. He's fun to read but I can't consider him serious.

J.D. Salinger is the greatest author of all time. No writers before or after have come close to the characterization, narration, thematic depth, prose style, and emotional resonance of The Catcher in the Rye.

>Not surprisingly, Beckett really dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is important.” He dismisses Agatha Christie’s Crooked House as “very tired Christie” but praises Around the World in 80 Days, “It is lively stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”
>"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all." John Updike about Salinger, in a review of Franny and Zooey
>In her memoir "Running With the Bulls," Valerie Hemingway, who worked as Hemingway’s secretary and later became his posthumous daughter-in-law, writes, "the contemporary American authors (Hemingway) most admired were J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote." Hemingway also bought Valerie a copy of "The Catcher in the Rye" shortly after they first met in Spain in 1959.

Everything else Fitzgerald wrote besides Gatsby was melodramatic soap opera shit (one might even say that of Gatsby, but I like Gatsby). The theme of Gatsby though (disillusionment and loss of the American dream) was done at least as well in Catcher, if not with such purple prose. Admit it, when Fitzgerald isn't being gorgeous, he's being uneven and purple.

You've let others do your thinking and choosing. Literally no criteria for Salinger's inclusion. What's next? Wuthering Heights is second?
Troll poster.

There are more than 200,000 writers better than Salinger, easily. Wake up, troll poster!

Melville was fucking nuts and he hadn't even seen a war like Salinger. His oeuvre was schizotypal fairytale land stuff covered with erudition and all the classics he learned in college. He was so dependent on alluding to the Bible, Plato, Paradise Lost, Greek mythology, etc… and drawing on his experiences with savages because he didn't know how to socialize with people. Melville's actually a good one, I've read Moby Dick, the Confidence-Man, and almost all of his short stories, but he was never capable of the attention to people and how they act, and the true sincerity and sentimentality of Salinger. Ishmael literally says in Moby-Dick that he makes all the characters more dramatic and heroic seeming even though they really weren't. He was stuck in the past.

Fell for the Salinger meme, again. When will he learn?

Moby Dick is tedious, gay, and precious. Moby Dick appeals to ponces who confuse girth with complexity, and benefits from a century of imagined depths granted to it by opportunistic critics.
Because it is such a lengthy, turgid read, they know most people will never transit the novel, and therefore their assertions will remain unchallenged. The author was such a mooning calf of an asshole that Natty Hawthorne told him to stop coming around. I think Melville bad touched Julien, but i can't back that up.

The Catcher in the Rye by Jerome David Salinger. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Towers above the rest of Salinger's writing. Noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style.

Name one hundred thousand better authors than Salinger.

The Catcher in the Rye is a book about death. It's a work of a work of almost gothic imagination. There's references to death on almost every other page. Why do you think Holden’s hunting hat is red: because Allie had red hair. There's Holden’s comment that “I act like I’m thirteen.” Although he’s sixteen when the book takes place, he was thirteen when Allie died. Why is Holden so urgent to know where the ducks went in the winter when the pond froze: he wanted to know where Allie had gone, and where he could find his mourning and unavailable mother. At the end of his B-movie reverie in the hotel where he pretends he's been shot, whether or not we want to know it, he finally tells us the truth: “What I really felt like, though,” he says, “was committing suicide.” This relentless awareness of death and the language of death, of common phrases that embody darker meanings, this language obsessively alert to itself, seems to me the sign of something closer to art than not.

I like this.

All of the objects of Holden’s affection were unavailable. Who are they? Jane Gallagher, the girl of his memories now going to football games with someone else; his dead brother, Allie; his little sister, Phoebe, who loves him but is too young to understand his teenage angst (she loses patience with him for not liking anything); and the Museum of Natural History (“I loved that damn museum”). In Holden’s world, love is wrapped up like a mummy. His failing history essay is about the Egyptians, what they used “when they wrapped up mummies so that their faces would not rot,” and his visit to the Metropolitan Museum culminates in his showing two little kids the way to the mummies. I don’t want to make too much of the fact that Holden seems really to be looking for his own Mummy, or Mommy, who has been very distracted, or perhaps even dead to him since Allie died, but then again why not? I think this is at the heart of the book. In Holden’s world, you can’t go back to childhood—that’s locked up in the Museum of Natural History, where Holden doesn’t make it past the front steps—but you can’t grow up either because growing up means becoming a phony. You can’t really fall in love because real love with a real person might be less than perfect (this is the adolescent’s dilemma), but you can’t really do anything but look for love. It’s a world in which if you really want to know the truth you can just get on a train and ride out west to a ranch. Of course, when you get there, the ranch might turn out to be Hollywood, or a psychiatric hospital. So maybe it’s better just to keep looking for romance, not truth—to keep failing in love forever.

All of them except Charlotte Bronte.

>best writer
>not a poet

Even Salinger tried to hide from Salinger. Look it up. He didn't believe the accolades you are heaping on him. You have gone full Pleb. No way this thread is serious.

"All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off. . ."

There’s the “It killed me” on page two about D. B. being in Hollywood, and then, at the bottom of the page, they talk about the football game: “ . . . you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win.” On page four Holden tells us that he “got the ax,” and by page five that “you felt like you were disappearing.” Still only on page five, Mrs. Spencer asks Holden, “Are you frozen to death?” and the next thing you know he’s being ushered into Spencer’s room, where the old man appears to be lying, practically, on
his death bed. On page nine, Holden talks about his gray hair; on page eleven, about the mummies; on fourteen, about a remark Spencer makes, “It made me sound dead, or something.” On page seventeen, “That killed me” reintroduces the recurring phrase that I eventually counted at least thirty-five times, and by page twenty, “You were a goner.” On page twenty two, Holden says of his hunting hat: “This is a people shooting hat . . . I shoot people in this hat.” And so on, and so on.

>Faulkner was too short to join the army
How tall do you have to be to join the army? Google says he was 5'5 and the army accepts people 5 foot and above.

faulkner was a manlet

I like this too, and let me tell you all just how I like it: I like it--you've guessed it--unironically.

I'm going to have to direct you to Babylon, Revisited.

Totally agree about J.D. though.

You are an ultra-turbo-pleb if you think Moby Dick is “long”

go back to reading against the day you cereal-eating faggot

Name one (1) book you’ve read that’s over 200 pages

cannonball

Now who’s the pseud

(you)

>best american writer
A lot of american poets are better than Salinger, imo, if you even wanna compare across genre. Whitman had more influence and defined all of American poetry. At his best he is sublime, surprising, humorous, and deeply sympathetic. I'd also vote for Stevens, who has performed a similar feat for the 20th century. Like Whitman, Stevens has his philosophical influences (Emerson and Kant) but his poetry nonetheless seems to spring entirely out of itself, like a blossom in the desert. It is difficult, oblique, and endlessly fecund in imagery and wordplay.

Cereal is the sublime breakfast and you should definitely kill yourself, eurotrash.

Whitman is ALMOST entirely one-dimensional if it weren't for a few references to the tedium of life, the sorrow of war, the assassination of Lincoln etc… but he always facilely concludes everything is equally happy in the end.

As Aristotle said, however, tragedy is the highest form of literature, and Salinger's work abounds with tragedy, along with the random moments of elation and redemption Whitman has.

go jam your plow-callused hands into pockets full of hummus and goat feces you brown-skinned middle eastern manlet FAGGOT

>JD Salinger is the greatest American writer of all time. No others compare.

I would definitely agree with you if I was still in 9th grade.

beckett was in his 50's when he first read it get some taste philistine

Tragedy is a type of theater, denoted by fatal flaw and oversight, not some vague postmodern notion of suffering and woe-is-me a la holden.

Sod off already. This entire thread is one big appeal to authority.
>Beckett says
>nabokov says
>Hemingway says
We get it, you like to circlejerk

Whiny fag didn't even read the OP post

>I'll call people fags, surely my new friends will accept me now!
OP also stands for original post, you redundant donkey

Get the fuck out of this thread if you can't analyze literature no one wants to read your HURRRRRR HOLDEN IS SO IMMMATURE AND WHINY GUIZE NOW THAT I AM BIG ADULT I DONT LIKE BOOKS LIKE THIS

>beckett was in his 50's when he first read it get some taste philistine

Did Beckett say Salinger was the greatest American writer of all-time?

>Everything else Fitzgerald wrote besides Gatsby was melodramatic soap opera shit
>I have only read Gatsby: the post

He thought The Catcher in the Rye was one of the greatest books of all time.

>I haven't read The Beautiful and Damned: the post

>The Beautiful and the Damned was soap opera shit
>TB&TD was the only thing Fitzgerald wrote other than Gatsby
How do plebs keep going with such minimal brainpower?

>I haven't read Tender is the Night: the post
>I haven't read any of Fitzgerald's short fiction: the post

Not that user, but Tender is the Night is a damn fine novel. By far the best thing he ever did.

Kill yourself, autist

>He thought The Catcher in the Rye was one of the greatest books of all time.

I think 'Turning Japanese' is one of the greatest songs of the Eighties--does that mean I think The Vapors are one of the greatest bands of the Eighties?

Kys, Salinger is the ultimate plebfilter

Yeah. Salinger only ever wrote one novel anyway.

...

If you can't read that then you won't be able to read A Perfect Day For Bananafish so don't even bother