The famous American writer Jerome David Salinger is a representative of the existentialism and neo- realism styles in the literature.
Existentialism is a term which has been applied to the work of a disparate group of late nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject - not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also …show more content…
Although details about Salinger are notoriously vague because of his reclusive nature, he has become the subject of a great deal of speculation. He refuses to give interviews or to deal with the press. Personal information about Salinger is therefore limited but in great demand. He married Claire Douglas, a student at Radcliffe, in 1955. They had two children, Margaret Ann (b. 1955) and Matthew (b. 1960), and were divorced in 1965... Salinger had a love affair with author Joyce Maynard in the early 1970s, which Maynard described in her 1998 memoir At Home In the World. She auctioned her personal letters from Salinger for nearly $160,000 in 1999... . In these letters, written in 1972, Salinger writes to Joyce Maynard, then an eighteen year-old student at Yale University who later left college to live with Salinger for nine months. These letters trace his growing attachment to Maynard and deal with the necessity of guarding and protecting the writer's source of creativity from the glare of the outside world. Maynard later became a published writer herself, publishing the comic novel To Die For and, in a controversial move, publishing a memoir concerning her relationship with Salinger. In her memoir, Maynard implied that Salinger's demand for privacy stemmed from his awareness that his activities, such as his several relationships with young women such as Maynard, would ultimately mar his