 John Lennon On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. He then sat down to read The Catcher in the Rye, his copy inscribed on the inside cover with “This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye.” Chapman’s previous days had also been made to parallel Holden’s — a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering in New York, a prostitute, a talk about the ducks, all distorted by his voices and hollow-point bullets. |
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 On this day in 1951 J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was published. Book dealers regard a signed copy of the first edition as “one of the most elusive of 20th century books.” The last signed edition for sale, about fifteen years ago, was inscribed by Salinger to Harold Ross of The New Yorker; the first Salinger story that Ross bought was also the first appearance of Holden Caulfield. |
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By Rachel Deahl
The critics have been rather unkind towards One Day (unfairly so, if you ask me), but all the hullabaloo about the tepidly-received adaptation of David Nicholls’s novel has made a favorite parlor game bubble to the surface: can movie versions of books ever compare to the original? (At NyMag.com many fans are talking about books that Hollywood shouldn’t touch; The Atlantic took One Day as an opportunity to discuss some of the eternal problems with romance on screen.)
As Slate critic Dana Stevens noted in her (mostly positive reviews) of the current Graham Greene adaptation, Brighton Rock, there is “some pretty robust evidence” proving great literature does not usually become great films. Of course, as Stevens then goes onto explain, Graham Greene, and this thriller in particular, has proven unusually fertile ground for many filmmakers.
For awhile I had a theory that literary novels were the toughest to translate to film. Genre works—a dicey and tricky description in and of itself—were the way to go. This, I assumed, accounted for the fact that so many of my favorite science fiction films are based on Phillip K. Dick novels (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall); that a few of my favorite Hitchcock novels are based on Daphne Du Maurier works (Rebecca and The Birds); and that Anthony Minghella, a director who is no stranger to turning popular, bestselling literary works into films, was at his best working off of a Patricia Highsmith novel, with The Talented Mr. Ripley.
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Callie Ingram and Anton Teubner, prior winners of a writing contest with a prize that included a year in Salinger's old room.
COLLEGEVILLE, Pa. — For years, officials at Ursinus College had been trying to figure out how to capitalize on the fact that J. D. Salinger had spent one semester there in the fall of 1938.
They were hoping to attract publicity for Ursinus and tried everything they could think of to lure Salinger from the secluded world he’d lived in for his final 50 years. They offered to make him a guest lecturer; to build a literary festival around him; to award him an honorary degree. “No response,” said Richard DiFeliciantonio, the vice president for enrollment at the small liberal arts college here. “Absolutely nothing.”
Then Jon Volkmer, an English professor, had what Holden Caulfield would have called a goddam terrific idea.
It appears that Holden Caulfield will remain under tight control of the Salinger estate—at least in North America. In early December, the estate of J.D. Salinger and Swedish author and publisher Fredrik Colting entered into a consent agreement to end the copyright battle over Colting’s book 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, the so-called “unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye,” that would bar the book’s publication the U.S….read more
