Recluse wrote for his own pleasure

Jerome David Salinger, the son of a Scots-Irish mother and a Jewish businessman - a prolific importer of cheeses and meat - was raised in uptown Manhattan.

Troubled at school, he was sent to a military academy in Pennsylvania at 15.

At the academy he began writing - often by torchlight under the blankets - and when he served in the US Army from 1942-1947, he carried a typewriter at all times, writing, he told a friend, "whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole".

Published in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye introduced the rebellious teenager Holden Caulfield.

It became Salinger's pinnacle achievement, surviving on school curriculums the world over and hailed through the decades as one of the most influential of all modern American novels.

For "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight - and concern", the Book of the Month Club said.

Written by a grown-up, the book spoke first to young readers who recognised in Caulfield the alienation they felt from the older generations.

If calculating the book's cultural import is impossible, its sales tell their own story; more than 60 million copies have sold worldwide. To critics it was clear at once: Caulfield was on course to replace Huckleberry Finn as America's favourite fictional truant.

Salinger spent most of his adult life avoiding the fame the book had afforded him, hiding in the remote town of Cornish in New Hampshire. Journalists were turned away, as were all requests for his most famous work to be parlayed into new forms, including celluloid.

His literary output was limited. Salinger published only a few books and collections of short stories throughout his career.

He had not published a new work since 1965. That was Hapworth 16 1968, a short story published in the New Yorker. The writer's fascination with youth and the impossibility of relinquishing it prompted one fellow wordsmith, Norman Mailer, to note that "Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school".

Mark Chapman, who assassinated John Lennon, said his motivation came from the pages of Rye. "This extraordinary book holds many answers," Chapman once stated.

Even in the last years of Salinger's life, hope always lingered that he might come up with some great and unexpected new work. In 1998, it was announced that he would expand Hapworth into a full-length book. It never happened.

Most tantalising now is a remark made by a neighbour of Salinger more than 10 years ago that he had indeed written 15 more novels but that he had never let them out of his sight, let alone sought their publication.

As his estate goes through the legal process of probate, scholars will be agog to know if the claim was true and what fate might await the unseen novels if, indeed, they exist.

All attempts to lure Salinger out of his isolation came to nought. "I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge Advocate in 1980. "But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it."

- INDEPENDENT