American author J.D. Salinger, long acclaimed for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, has died at 91 in New Hampshire.
Salinger, who celebrated his birthday on Jan. 1, died of natural causes at his home, according to a statement from his literary representatives, citing the author's son.
The reclusive writer had not published a new work since 1965. But his coming-of-age fiction influenced generations of young men and women, and is now hailed as a classic of postwar American literature.
Jerome David Salinger was born in New York in 1919, and raised in an affluent Manhattan neighbourhood. He began writing short stories in high school and had several stories published before he served with the U.S. army in the Second World War.
Drafted into the infantry, he took part in the invasion of Normandy and was involved in one of the bloodiest episodes of the war, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest in Germany.
Salinger's first and only published novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was an immediate success upon publication in 1951. The story of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who runs away from his school to New York to find himself, gave voice to a generation of frustrated youth who longed to escape the strictures of postwar U.S. society.
Classic of adolescence
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