"Catcher in the Rye" Author Salinger Dies
A Pacific white-sided dolphin calf swims along with its mother Piquet, Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. The baby male dolphin, which does not have a name, was born on Memorial Day. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato) / Kiichiro Sato
Last updated 2:45 p.m. ET
J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's longtime literary representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight - and concern."
Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing - more than 60 million copies worldwide - and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.
Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher" presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.
Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator.
"`Catcher in the Rye' made a very powerful and surprising impression on me," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who read the book, as so many did, when he was in middle school. "Part of it was the fact that our seventh grade teacher was actually letting us read such a book. But mostly it was because `Catcher' had such a recognizable authenticity in the voice that even in 1977 or so, when I read it, felt surprising and rare in literature."
The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book holds many answers."
By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook.
On the Web Thursday, there was an outpouring of sadness for the loss of Salinger, as many flocked together on social networks to relate their memories of "Catcher in the Rye." Topics such as "Salinger" and "Holden Caufield" were among the most popular on Twitter. CNN's Larry King tweeted that "Catcher" is his favorite book. Humorist John Hodgman wrote: "I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive."
Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of "Catcher," but they are still read, again and again, with great affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.
The collection "Nine Stories" features the classic "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel "Franny and Zooey," like "Catcher," is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.
"Everyone who works here and writes here at The New Yorker, even now, decades after his silence began, does so with a keen awareness of J.D. Salinger's voice," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, where many of Salinger's stories appeared. "In fact, he is so widely read in America, and read with such intensity, that it's hard to think of any reader, young and old, who does not carry around the voices of Holden Caulfield or Glass family members."
"Catcher," narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for failing four classes and for general apathy.
He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him everywhere from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with his kid sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to escape to a cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as just so much phoniness.
"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question."
"The Catcher in the Rye" became both required and restricted reading, periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.
"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of `The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for "20th Century Authors."
"It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach," he added.
Salinger also wrote the novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour - An Introduction," both featuring the neurotic, fictional Glass family that appeared in much of his work.
His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker in 1965. By then, he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once commented.
In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book - prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.
"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. "But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it."
Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family lived for years on Park Avenue.
Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published his first fiction, "The Young Folks," in Story magazine.
He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend.
Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E. Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman Melville.
Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post. Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New Yorker, where excerpts from "Catcher" were published.
The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews were blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York Times found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and observed that Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted."
But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive, human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T. Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden.
"Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or good intention."
The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. (Salinger was also briefly married in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her.)
Meanwhile, he refused interviews, instructing his agent not to forward fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion.
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."
"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."
Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of "Catcher," with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein were also rejected.
Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and Salinger dropped the suit.
Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton, that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which came out in a revised edition in 1988.
In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's "60 Years Later," an unauthorized sequel to "Catcher" that imagined Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever.
Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In 1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir "At Home in the World," in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric eating habits, and described their problematic sex life.
When Maynard's letters were auctioned, the buyer promised to return them to Salinger out of respect for his privacy, CBS Radio News reported.
Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher" portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.
Margaret Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."
CBS/ AP J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's longtime literary representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight - and concern."
Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing - more than 60 million copies worldwide - and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.
Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher" presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.
Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator.
"`Catcher in the Rye' made a very powerful and surprising impression on me," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who read the book, as so many did, when he was in middle school. "Part of it was the fact that our seventh grade teacher was actually letting us read such a book. But mostly it was because `Catcher' had such a recognizable authenticity in the voice that even in 1977 or so, when I read it, felt surprising and rare in literature."
The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book holds many answers."
By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook.
On the Web Thursday, there was an outpouring of sadness for the loss of Salinger, as many flocked together on social networks to relate their memories of "Catcher in the Rye." Topics such as "Salinger" and "Holden Caufield" were among the most popular on Twitter. CNN's Larry King tweeted that "Catcher" is his favorite book. Humorist John Hodgman wrote: "I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive."
Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of "Catcher," but they are still read, again and again, with great affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.
The collection "Nine Stories" features the classic "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel "Franny and Zooey," like "Catcher," is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.
"Everyone who works here and writes here at The New Yorker, even now, decades after his silence began, does so with a keen awareness of J.D. Salinger's voice," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, where many of Salinger's stories appeared. "In fact, he is so widely read in America, and read with such intensity, that it's hard to think of any reader, young and old, who does not carry around the voices of Holden Caulfield or Glass family members."
"Catcher," narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for failing four classes and for general apathy.
He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him everywhere from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with his kid sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to escape to a cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as just so much phoniness.
"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question."
"The Catcher in the Rye" became both required and restricted reading, periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.
"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of `The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for "20th Century Authors."
"It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach," he added.
Salinger also wrote the novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour - An Introduction," both featuring the neurotic, fictional Glass family that appeared in much of his work.
His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker in 1965. By then, he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once commented.
In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book - prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.
"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. "But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it."
Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family lived for years on Park Avenue.
Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published his first fiction, "The Young Folks," in Story magazine.
He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend.
Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E. Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman Melville.
Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post. Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New Yorker, where excerpts from "Catcher" were published.
The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews were blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York Times found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and observed that Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted."
But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive, human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T. Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden.
"Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or good intention."
The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. (Salinger was also briefly married in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her.)
Meanwhile, he refused interviews, instructing his agent not to forward fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion.
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."
"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."
Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of "Catcher," with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein were also rejected.
Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and Salinger dropped the suit.
Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton, that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which came out in a revised edition in 1988.
In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's "60 Years Later," an unauthorized sequel to "Catcher" that imagined Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever.
Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In 1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir "At Home in the World," in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric eating habits, and described their problematic sex life.
When Maynard's letters were auctioned, the buyer promised to return them to Salinger out of respect for his privacy, CBS Radio News reported.
Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher" portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.
Margaret Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."
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<a href="http://ketiva.com/News_and_Events/author_of_the_catcher_in_the_rye_jd_salinger_dead_at_91.html">http://ketiva.com/News_and_Events/author_of_the_catcher_in_the_rye_jd_salinger_dead_at_91.html</a>
Newman's youthful persona made you think he might have been of the Korean War or Vietnam War eras.
"While on location in Mexico filming Vera Cruz (1954), cast members Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson found themselves with some extra time on their hands and decided to go to the nearest town to get some cigarettes. Still in full costume -- including bandoliers and pistols -- they mounted their horses and headed out. Along the way they were spotted by a truckful of Mexican "federales" -- federal police -- who mistook them for bandits and held them at gunpoint until their identities could be verified." - IMDb.com
Too bad Humphrey Bogart wasn't with them on that occasion. He would have demanded to see some identification.
Salinger chose to be like Brando : (
The Cathcer in the Rye is overrated as literature.
================================================
"For his strong support of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (and effective use of television commercials in California) and his strong opposition to the War in Vietnam, Newman was placed nineteenth on Richard Nixon's enemies list, which he [Newman] claimed was his greatest accomplishment.
Consistent with his work for liberal causes, Newman publicly supported Ned Lamont's candidacy in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary against Senator Joe Lieberman, and was even rumored as a candidate himself, until Lamont emerged as a credible alternative. He donated to Chris Dodd's presidential campaign.
He attended the first Earth Day event in Manhattan on April 22, 1970. Newman was also a vocal supporter of gay rights, including same-sex marriage."
Wikipedia, with external references
I suppose, a thousand years from now, scholars will be saying that about me too.
That's enough out of erb0087.
Let somebody else get a word in edgewise.
Let me say in closing that J.D. Salinger would not be the only great writer whose personal life left something to be desired.
Eugene O'Neill was the most gifted playwright America has ever produced, but his personal life could be seen as a train wreck of alcoholism, drug addiction, alienation and a horrendously dysfunctional family life.
During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris. Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing, and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two writers began corresponding; Salinger wrote Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war.
Salinger added that he was working on a play about Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of his story "Slight Rebellion off Madison," and hoped to play the part himself.
Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He was also among the first soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp. Salinger's experiences in the war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and he later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."
Both of his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories, such as "For Esme ? with Love and Squalor", which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, and published several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker, but with little success; it rejected all of his submissions from 1944 to 1946, and in 1945 rejected a group of 15 poems."
When Oona O'Neill saw Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds, where he portrayed her estranged father, she wrote him a letter saying "Thanks to you, I now can love my father". Nicholson has said that "that is the best compliment I ever got".
Chaplin and Oona maintained a close relationship for 35 years. Because of his age and renown, biographers have suggested that Chaplin was a paternal figure in their relationship, even after making eight children together."
After John Hinckley, Jr.'s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981, police found The Catcher in the Rye among half a dozen other books in his hotel room.
Robert John Bardo, who murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer [she costarred with Pam Dawber in the television series "My Sister Sam"], was carrying the book when he visited Schaeffer's apartment in Hollywood on July 18, 1989.
As numerous murders have been speculated to be connected to the novel, the film Conspiracy Theory depicts assassins brainwashed with an urge to purchase it."
References to The Catcher in the Rye in media and popular culture are numerous. Works inspired by The Catcher in the Rye have been said to form their own genre. Dr. Sarah Graham assessed works influenced by The Catcher in the Rye to include the novels Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and Judith Guest's Ordinary People. Graham also includes the films The Graduate, Dead Poets Society, Tadpole, Igby Goes Down, and Donnie Darko, and music by Green Day, Third Eye Blind and The Offspring. In the decade following its publication, there were more than 70 essays on the novel printed in American and British magazines.
The influence of The Catcher in the Rye can be seen in the films of director Wes Anderson, most notably in his debut film Bottle Rocket. In an early scene the protagonist Anthony goes to visit his precocious sister Grace at her elementary school, shortly after checking himself out of a mental health facility. Both the topic and tone of their conversation mimics the discussions of Holden and Phoebe. In addition to pleading with Anthony to come home and stay with the family, Grace makes insightful observations on her brother's character flaws, as Phoebe does during the talk in D.B.'s room. Although only grade-school age Grace, like Phoebe, is mature beyond her years and acts as the voice of reason. In another parallel of the book, Grace interacts briefly with a friend called Bernice, also the name of a friend mentioned by Phoebe in her diary."