by PBS
Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, in 1923, to poor Jewish parents originally from Russia. Upon his return from the war, he attended New York University on the GI Bill and received a master’s from Columbia University. He worked in magazine publishing, then switched to copywriting for an advertising agency, where one of his colleagues was Mary Higgins Clark, who would become a bestselling suspense author. After the massive success of Catch-22, Heller went on to write more novels, including a 1994 sequel to Catch-22 called Closing Time, several screenplays, and two memoirs, before his death in 1999.
Not many novelists can be said to have invented a common expression. With Catch-22 Heller not only created an enduring satire about human conflict, but he also coined an idiom describing the experience of being caught in a problem that forbids its own solution. The catch-22 that Heller’s pilots face is that they can be excused only from flying missions if they are found to be insane, but requesting an evaluation of their sanity shows that they are concerned for themselves and thus must be sane. This kind of arbitrary double bind seems to permeate modern life, with its opaque bureaucracies and conflicting imperatives, and all we can do, as Heller shows us, is laugh and despair at once.
Cover of the first edition of Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951.
Portrait of author J. D. Salinger, taken in 1952. A recluse for most of his life, he is credited with creating the modern archetype of the cynical teenager in the form of Holden Caulfield.
Wollman Rink at 59th Street and Sixth Avenue in Central Park, photographed in 1951. In Catcher in the Rye Holden recalls happy memories here skating with his siblings.
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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
J. D. Salinger · 1951
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is the hub around which so many subsequent novels and movies turn: The Outsiders (1967), about a boy too sensitive for the world in which he lives; Rushmore (1998), about another young man who falls apart after getting expelled; Less Than Zero (1985), about wealthy kids who use drugs and sex to cope with isolation and alienation; Turtles All the Way Down (2017), about a teenage girl with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Indeed, when we contemplate adolescence and anxiety, it’s likely Holden Caulfield who springs first to mind. In many ways, J. D. Salinger created the modern archetype of the teenager.
This debut novel focuses on 16-year-old Holden during a long weekend in New York City in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Recently expelled from Pencey Prep, Holden decides to leave school early, after a fight with his roommate. Roaming around Manhattan in a red hunting cap, he becomes mildly obsessed with finding out what happens to the ducks in Central Park during the winter, asking various people to weigh in. He has a disastrous date with a girl named Sally, tries to have sex with a prostitute, visits with his precocious kid sister and a beloved former teacher, and hangs out in some of the haunts of his youth.
In Holden’s world, there are few things worse than being a “phony.” He strives to be anything but. From his very first line, in which he lets readers know that he won’t be offering any of the usual biographical details or “all that David Copperfield kind of crap,” he speaks with a candor and forthrightness entirely his own. Even when he tells us that he’s “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life,” readers believe every word he says, because of this honesty. The use of slang and profanity also heighten the novel’s realism. Within two weeks of its publication, the book was a bestseller, and continues to sell around 250,000 copies a year.
The Catcher in the Rye is a very New York novel. Holden skates with Sally at the Rink at Rockefeller Center, sees a show at Radio City Music Hall, and takes his sister, Phoebe, to the American Museum of Natural History and the Central Park Zoo. The city fuels his interior monologue. Even today, visitors and locals alike continue to plan itineraries based on places Holden goes as he wanders, ruminating and reminiscing.
Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 and grew up in Manhattan. He briefly attended New York University and Columbia, where in 1941 he wrote a story about Holden called “Slight Rebellion off Madison.” A mentor urged him to put the character in a novel. Two years after The Catcher in the Rye catapulted him to stardom, Salinger left Manhattan for a farm in New Hampshire, where he would live out the remainder of his days as a recluse; as an obituary explained, Salinger became “famous for not wanting to be famous.” He published no further novels after his first, but three collections of stories and novellas came out in the next decade: Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963); a fourth collection, Three Early Stories, was published posthumously in 2014. Periodically rumors creep up about manuscripts locked in safes, but to date no further work has appeared.
Salinger once wrote, “Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.” The Catcher in the Rye seems to see straight into the soul of everyone who feels conflicted about entering adulthood, which is to say, pretty much everyone. Picking up on the theme, Norman Mailer quipped that Salinger was “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.” Salinger’s devotees would no doubt respond, “Yeah, so?”
Cover of Charlotte’s Web, published in 1952.
Author E. B. White photographed with his dog, Minnie.
An original illustration for Charlotte’s Web by Garth Williams pictures Wilbur underneath a web where Charlottle spun the word TERRIFIC.
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CHARLOTTE’S WEB
E. B. White · 1952
E.B. White thought up the central plot of Charlotte’s Web (1952) as he walked through his barn to feed his pig. He’d purchased a farm in coastal Maine in 1933 and, as a lifelong lover of animals and nature, cherished the time he spent among the sheep, geese, chickens, pigs, and, yes, spiders who lived there. Even though he understood the usual cycle of life on a farm, White was nevertheless sad to think that an animal he’d bought to slaughter would have to die. So he began to consider alternatives. Around this time, he carefully cut down the egg sac of a spider he’d been observing in his barn and carried it in a candy box back to his Manhattan apartment, then allowed the newly born spiders to colonize his dresser. And thus the story of a special friendship between a pig and a spider was conceived.
The runt of the litter, Wilbur is initially spared on account of his smallness, thanks to the intervention of a little girl named Fern. Snubbed by other animals, he becomes friends with Charlotte, a wise spider who lives above his pigpen. When Wilbur discovers that he will be killed once he gets fat enough, Charlotte helps him develop a plan: she’ll weave superlative statements about Wilbur—such as “Some Pig”—into her web. Call it arachnid marketing.
The publicity campaign is a success: Wilbur grows too popular to be butchered. However, shortly after spinning an egg sac at the county fair, Charlotte dies. Compounding Wilbur’s grief, her offspring scatter, except for three who take up residence in their mother’s original web near Wilbur. These three and their descendants ensure that Wilbur lives out his days in friendly company.
As in many great children’s books, a vein of sadness runs throughout Charlotte’s Web. Summer ends. Kids grow up, abandoning their parents in the process. Love is powerful but not powerful enough to overcome the forces of nature. Everything must die, no matter what. The effectiveness with which the novel delivers these hard but important truths comes from the book’s humility: White never sets out to teach lessons, but rather allows readers to draw them from his simple, affecting tale.
White turned to children’s fiction as a way of entertaining his niece, but he’d already been a successful writer for many years. He was born in upstate New York in 1899, edited the student newspaper while an undergraduate at Cornell University, worked in public relations and publishing, and wrote articles for the New Yorker for over 50 years. He even married the magazine’s fiction editor, Katharine Angell. The “E. B.” stood for Elwyn Brooks, but he was generally known as “Andy.”
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p; After publishing a piece about his Cornell writing teacher William Strunk Jr., White was asked to update Strunk’s “Little Book” concerning grammar and composition. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style appeared in 1959, inspiring generations of writers with such nuggets as “use the active voice” and “omit needless words.” White followed his own advice; his lucid, perfectly controlled prose continues to beguile readers and has helped to make Charlotte’s Web one of the most celebrated and bestselling children’s books of all time. The novel has been adapted into multiple feature films, cartoons, a musical, and even a video game. White received a special Pulitzer Prize for his entire oeuvre in 1978 and died in his farmhouse in 1985.
Often asked whether his stories were true, White would demur: “They are imaginary tales, containing fantastic characters and events.… But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination.” Charlotte’s Web somehow seems like both—an imaginative story that becomes so much a part of ourselves as we read that it feels real.
Cover of the first edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950.
Portrait of author C. S. Lewis, taken in 1958. As a literature professor at Oxford, Lewis joined a writing group called the Inklings, in which his friend J. R. R. Tolkien was also a member.
Aslan from the 2005 film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, directed by directed by Andrew Adamson.
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THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA SERIES
C. S. Lewis · 1950–1956
Like a kaleidoscope, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) series changes color and contour, depending on how you turn it. On the one hand, the seven books of fantasy rank alongside The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), His Dark Materials (1995–2000), and Harry Potter (1997–2007) as epic entertainment and classic children’s tales. On the other hand, the books serve as primer texts for Christian apologetics, with allegories both covert and overt running throughout. Aslan may be a heroic lion of enormous proportions, for instance, or he may be an embodiment of Jesus—it’s the reader’s choice.
Lewis began conceiving of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, probably the best-known of the novels, in 1939, then picked it up in earnest in 1949. In the book, as the Blitz pummels London, the four Pevensie children are sent to live with wacky old Professor Kirke. Exploring one day, the youngest, Lucy, discovers a wardrobe through which she can enter another world, full of talking animals and mythical creatures. At first her siblings dismiss her claims about Narnia, as it’s called, but eventually they make it to the strange land as well. Narnia is in the midst of a long winter, with the evil White Witch in charge. The aforementioned Aslan, gallant and beneficent, is her sworn enemy.
Six more books track the adventures of the Pevensies and explain the history of Narnia: Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), The Magician’s Nephew (1955), and The Last Battle (1956). Lewis wrote them in an order different from the one in which they were published, and readers disagree about whether they should be read in the order they were written, in the order they were published, or by sequence according to the plot’s chronology.
Clive Staples Lewis loved mythology and animals from a young age. He was born in Ireland in 1898 and studied in England. During his tenure as a literature professor at Oxford, Lewis participated in an informal writing group called the Inklings, whose members also included his friend and fellow faculty member J. R. R. Tolkien. Referring to a draft of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tolkien noted, “It really won’t do, you know.” Whereas Tolkien went to great lengths to separate his staunch Catholicism from his fantasy novels, Lewis had no such compunction. His spiritual path contributed to his religious frankness: he was raised Protestant, but became an atheist as a young man. He started to return to religion after being wounded in battle during World War I, and converted back to Christianity in 1931. Most of his books, whether fiction or nonfiction, deal in some way with his religious beliefs. Lewis died in 1963.
After a successful, Emmy-nominated BBC television series that aired from 1988 to 1990, Disney produced three movies based on the books in the 2000s. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe also remains a staple in children’s live theater. But the biggest impact of Lewis’s novels has been on literature itself. Of the four Pevensie siblings, the eldest daughter, Susan, stops believing in Narnia as she matures, becoming more interested in boys and clothes than talking beavers. Neil Gaiman wrote a story in 2004 called “The Problem of Susan,” addressing this shift; the title has become a catchphrase for a feminist critique of the series and of fantasy as a genre. More broadly, Lev Grossman borrowed the trope of children escaping into—and rising to rule—a magical land for his Magicians trilogy (2009–2014). As he would later explain, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe taught him how novels worked. You open a book, you fall through the covers, and you land somewhere else—only to look up and find you never really left.
Another Day, Another Dollar
WRITERS WITH DAY JOBS
DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB. So goes the line we habitually utter to those who wish to earn a living through their imagination. Of course, it’s the rare writer who can find super-success right away, or who can live off the proceeds of writing alone. Many writers worked a day job while writing on the side, and some kept the day job even as they began to find success by their pen. Still others found fame only posthumously, necessitating a fair amount of clock-punching to keep themselves and their families afloat.
JEAN M. AUEL: Keypunch Operator, Circuit Board Designer, Technical Writer
Throughout the 1970s, while raising five children, Jean M. Auel worked a variety of jobs at an electronics plant in Portland, Oregon, and earned an MBA from the University of Portland. She quit upon discovering that the plant wouldn’t hire female managers, and turned her attention to her novel about a group of Paleolithic cavepeople. The gamble paid off, and The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) set a new record for the largest advance ever paid for a debut novel.
CHARLES DICKENS: Factory Worker, Freelance Journalist, Editor
Charles Dickens was forced to work in a factory at age 12 after his father was sent to debtor’s prison; this experience would haunt his novels, manifesting in children forced to grow up—and to toil—much too soon. A few years later, Dickens became a court reporter and stenographer, then started working as a freelance journalist. Eventually he founded and edited literary magazines, which would serialize many of his novels, as well as work by Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and other contemporaries.
DIANA GABALDON: Science Professor
With a PhD in quantitative behavioral ecology, Diana Gabaldon taught scientific computation and other subjects at Arizona State University’s Center for Environmental Studies, founded the journal Science Software Quarterly, contributed entries to the Encyclopedia of Computers, and wrote several scientific articles and textbooks. She also penned comic-book scripts for Disney. But she always longed to write fiction and in 1988 started writing a novel about time travel just for fun.
STEPHEN KING: High-School Teacher
After graduating from the University of Maine in 1970 with a degree in English and a teaching certificate, Stephen King could not find a job teaching, so he began working in a commercial laundry to pay the bills, writing all the while. In 1971 he was hired as an English teacher, which gave him plenty of material to work with as he began drafting Carrie (1974). When that novel about a telekinetic misfit who gets revenge on her tormentors became a bestseller, he devoted himself to writing full-time.
HARPER LEE: Airline Ticket Agent
The daughter of a prominent lawyer, Harper Lee grew up expecting to be a lawyer too; she even earned a place at the law school at the University of Alabama. She dropped out, however, in 1949, and moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a writer. To support herself, she worked as a ticket agent for airlines. One Christmas, her frie
nds got together and gave her a year’s salary, enabling her to quit the job and focus on the manuscript that became To Kill a Mockingbird.
Pulitzer Prize winner Harper Lee, photographed here in 1960, worked as an airline ticket agent to support her writing dreams.
Kurt Vonnegut used downtime during his job as a car saleseman to write or doodle.
HERMAN MELVILLE: Customs Inspector
In 1851, Herman Melville published Moby-Dick; it was decidedly not a success. Nor were his subsequent novels. He launched a public lecture series in the late 1850s, in the hopes of supplementing his income, but that too failed. Thanks to the influence of his wife and her family, Melville secured a position as a customs clerk for the city of New York in 1866, a job he would hold for close to two decades. Despite his lengthy service, he never received a raise.
TONI MORRISON: Editor, Professor
Toni Morrison began working as a textbook editor at Random House in Syracuse after separating from her husband in 1964. She would wake up at 4:00 a.m. to write. A few years later, she transferred to the publisher’s New York office and began acquiring and editing titles by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton, and James Baldwin, among other diverse authors; she would work at Random House for 19 years. In 1989, Morrison became a professor of creative writing and literature at Princeton University.