My Dad has Published Almost as many Novels as J.D. Salinger
Unless there have been posthumous novels published since his death in 2010. Need to check.
Jerome, or Jerry, Salinger, author extraordinaire. Born in 1924, later to publish the Catcher in the Rye. The youth's misinterpretation of a Robert Burns poem, from maybe 1860.
J.D. wished to harken to a time of more innocence, before "phony" (and terrible adulthood) would catch him and toss him over the cliff. Perhaps he died many times inside, so much that he was broken into many parts that people have a hard time understanding, putting together. His son, Matthew, loved and cherished him. His daughter Margaret, not so much.
Salinger lived to be 91. My dad is now 88. Given up on his novels, we are assured, like the thought or beginning of two men trying to extricate themselves from southern Algeria, or somewhere deep down in the Sahara. Paul Bowles managed this book, or at least the Algerian vast landscape, decades ago, likely unbeknownst to my father, but a bit bewitching to me. I will not read it, yet, having seen a film version, reading some summaries and critiques. Disturbing and sad, is what we learn. Books in Algeria! Perhaps for me yet? We never know.
Should fiction be terrifying and sad, like that created by Cormac McCarthy or Richard Mathison?
Enough of that fiction, there is plenty of real pathos and tragedy for that!
My dad published two novels with the august octogenarian Mary Campbell in the 2000 teens. Around 2012 or 2013? Perhaps before. We will check.
Letters to Lucretia and Forgotten Memory. At least one got looks at or consideration by Morgan Freeman, or his folks, possibly adapted to him. That was cool. His books may not move much. Nothing like Salinger.
Not to be compared to Salinger, who seems to have altered human history with his literature. And his life. My dad? Much smaller circles of influence. But my father was not a determined writer since his teenage years in the 1950s. Salinger was very intent on writing since he was 17, in the early 1940s.
I wanted to be a writer since the 1980s, in my teenage years.
No novels from me, or at least none published.
My father helped write and publish a non-fiction book in the 1970s. About genealogy, or family history. He has written a number of letters, or mini-memoirs, and other small stories or remembrances.
A little like me. I have written or composes some poems. A bit like my daughter. The oldest.
She may trump us men. Who knows?
May any of us compare to the late, great J.D. Salinger. We are not traumatized by battles and death, burnt flesh and awful carnage and violence.
But we may have some important things to share, write, and impart.
