John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Influence[edit]

Salinger's writing has influenced several prominent writers, prompting Harold Brodkey (an O. Henry Award-winning author) to say in 1991, "His is the most influential body of work in English prose by anyone since Hemingway."^[148] Of the writers in Salinger's generation, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike, attested that "the short stories of J. D. Salinger really opened my eyes as to how you can weave fiction out of a set of events that seem almost unconnected, or very lightly connected ... [Reading Salinger] stick[s] in my mind as really having moved me a step up, as it were, toward knowing how to handle my own material."^[149] Menand has observed that the early stories of Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth were affected by "Salinger's voice and comic timing".^[38]

National Book Award finalist Richard Yates told The New York Times in 1977 that reading Salinger's stories for the first time was a landmark experience, and that "nothing quite like it has happened to me since".^[150] Yates called Salinger "a man who used language as if it were pure energy beautifully controlled, and who knew exactly what he was doing in every silence as well as in every word." Gordon Lish's O. Henry Award-winning short story "For Jeromé—With Love and Kisses" (1977, collected in What I Know So Far, 1984) is a play on Salinger's "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor".^[151][152]

In 2001, Menand wrote in The New Yorker that "Catcher in the Rye rewrites" among each new generation had become "a literary genre all its own".^[38] He classed among them Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Writer Aimee Bender was struggling with her first short stories when a friend gave her a copy of Nine Stories; inspired, she later described Salinger's effect on writers, explaining: "[I]t feels like Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in a day, and that incredible feeling of ease inspires writing. Inspires the pursuit of voice. Not his voice. My voice. Your voice."^[153] Authors such as Stephen Chbosky,^[154] Jonathan Safran Foer,^[155] Carl Hiaasen, Susan Minot,^[156] Haruki Murakami, Gwendoline Riley,^[157] Tom Robbins, Louis Sachar,^[158] Joel Stein,^[159] Leonardo Padura, and John Green have cited Salinger as an influence. Musician Tomas Kalnoky of Streetlight Manifesto also cites Salinger as an influence, referencing him and Holden Caulfield in the song "Here's To Life". Biographer Paul Alexander called Salinger "the Greta Garbo of literature".^[160]

In the mid-1960s, Salinger was drawn to Sufi mysticism through the writer and thinker Idries Shah's seminal work The Sufis, as were others writers such as Doris Lessing and Geoffrey Grigson and the poets Robert Graves and Ted Hughes.^[161] As well as Shah, Salinger read the Taoist philosopher Lao Tse and the Hindu Swami Vivekananda who introduced the Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world.^[162]