Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was published on this date in 1951. It’s sold about 60 million copies since. The following is excerpted from a longer piece today at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
Salinger’s division hit the beach in the fifth hour of the invasion, and for the next several months Salinger saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. Between 50 and 200 soldiers in his division were killed or wounded every day. At the end of the war, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from a nervous breakdown. He spent several months recuperating.
It was after Salinger’s release from the hospital that he sent out for publication the first Holden Caulfield story narrated by Holden Caulfield himself, a story called “I’m Crazy.” It was published in Collier‘s in December of 1945. One year later, in 1946, The New Yorker finally published “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which they had been holding onto since before the war began. J.D. Salinger had finally become a New Yorker writer, something he’d been dreaming of for more than a decade.
Major John Glenn, USMC, set a transcontinental (Los Angeles to New York) speed record of 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds on this date in 1957. Average speed: 723 mph.
Will Ferrell is 41 today; Barry Sanders is 40.
Two Hollywood greats, Ruby Catherine Stevens and Virginia Katherine McMath were born on July 16th.
We know Stevens better as Barbara Stanwyck, born in 1907, she was a four time best actress Oscar nominee. Anthony Lane wrote an excellent review of Stanwyck’s work last year for The New Yorker.
And we know McMath better as Ginger Rogers, born in 1911, and an Oscar winner for best actress for Kitty Foyle. This from the abstract of a 1995 New Yorker item by Arlene Croce about Rogers.
Ginger Rogers was a star because she was unique and representative at the same time; she was complicatedly iconographic. Her very name tells us all we need to know. First of all, it’s euphonious (those three soft “g”s), and then what the first name specifies–something delicious–the last name, a half rhyme, pluralizes.
Apollo 11 left Florida for the moon on this date in 1969.