J. D. SalingerJerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. He has not published an original work since 1965 and has not been interviewed since 1980.
The Catch In The Copyright -- Financial Times
J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye has sold 35m copies over the decades and stood, this week, at 122 on the Amazon bestseller list. Now Mr Salinger – a reclusive, litigious 90-year-old – is suing Britain’s Wind-Up Bird Publishing, Swedish publisher Nicotext and a US distributor over their decision to bring out a novel that draws on it. Just published in the UK and due out in the US in coming weeks, 60 Years Later was written by “John David California”, the pseudonym of one of the Swedish firm’s founders. It concerns a 76-year-old named Mr C. – easily identifiable as Mr Salinger’s protagonist Holden Caulfield – who escapes from a nursing home and returns to many of the same Manhattan places that Holden did in Mr Salinger’s original.
Mr Salinger filed a legal complaint in Manhattan this month to halt publication, on the grounds that the book is “a rip-off pure and simple”, an “unauthorised sequel” that wrongly uses “his Holden Caulfield character”. But is the character “his”? Are literary characters the property of the artists who create them?
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Bookyards section on J.D. Salinger is HERE.
