Jonathan Tremblay: Howard Zinn and JD Salinger: The History of Passing Writers
[Jonathan Tremblay is a Historian and works as a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network]
In the past centuries, one profession and group of people are assuredly remembered more than the rest: writers. Mostly because their names are affixed to a piece of literature, poetry, music, history or fiction, it is a name that will live on as long as succeeding generations deem the works “classic”. That being said, what of the man? Surely a writer is embodied with his work but the recent passing of two literary greats has shown us that the writer himself becomes banal, unimportant even, as he completes his cycle on earth.
Penning The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, JD Salinger gave us Holden Caulfield as the very first troubled adolescent soul that spawned the Taxi Drivers, Rebels Without a Cause and much of the past decade in fiction. Both taught and banned in schools worldwide, the book was an instant classic and gave Salinger de facto immortality. The man behind the book however continued to exist for almost sixty years, living the life of an eccentric recluse that rarely spoke in public and almost never released another word he wrote. He died at the age of 91 as a forgotten man yet as an unforgettable author. We cared little for his life and, with the media frenzy over Afghanistan and Haiti showed little interest in his death.
On the very same day, Howard Zinn passed away at the age of 87. Publishing A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Zinn was a left-wing historian that has been called “visionary” by some and “socialist” by others. His ultimate work is still taught in the USA as a different and more populist take on their national history and around the world as a model of the unconventional retelling of history. Zinn continued to live in the public eye after the release of his work. In fact, he was touring talk shows and collaborating with Hollywood stars just last autumn working on another “people’s” History. Despite this continuous devotion to historical dissent and philosophical activism, Zinn passed without much rumbling on news services while historical circles still cry the death of a wonderful writer and/or brilliant adversary.
The imagination of both these men set them apart as some of the greatest lateral thinkers in recent history. Now dead, we are made to wonder if the lives of these writers were as important as their works, and indeed, as their legacies.
Well, only time can tell what, if and how we will remember Howard Zinn and JD Salinger. All we can do for now is to reminisce about the passing of other great writers and how their timely deaths were at times publicised and chagrined and at others trivial and wholly forgettable.
William Shakespeare was definitely notorious and celebrated in his time but the end of his lifelong career has been of little interest to anyone except his biographers. He wrote but a few collaborations in the last decade of his life and died, a shadow of a man, weakened by age. He left a wife and two daughters, both of whom never bore a son. Shakespeare the oeuvre lives on but Shakespeare the man and bloodline were no more by the mid 1600s.
George Orwell notoriously wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen-eighty-four. Beyond these visionary and incisive pieces of work, Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) died in 1950 at the relatively young age of 46, crippled by health problems. Famed science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L Ron Hubbard enjoyed a fair bit of fame before ending their writing careers and retreating to finish their lives in disease and substance abuse. It should be mentioned that Asimov died in 1992 of an HIV infection contracted during a blood transfusion, condemning his family to complete silence about his legacy (until some of the HIV/AIDS taboo was lifted) whereas Hubbard’s works have spawned the Church of Scientology and had made him over half a billion dollars in wealth by the time of his death in 1986.
Finally, there are the writers that left us legendary pieces of literature and accordingly suffered from tortured souls and twisted lives. Dostoyevsky dies penniless and in deep depression due to an intense gambling addiction as late 1800s Russia enjoyed the Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Mark Twain spiralled into depression as family and friends died around him and as he stubbornly continued to live despite a healthy life-long tobacco and alcohol intake. He finally left us in 1910 at the age of 75. More disturbed still were the writers that left us in their prime. The Hemingways, Plaths, Dickinsons and Woolfs that withered away, imprisoned in their own tortured psyche and whom finally took their own lives. They understood that the public had used them and no longer needed their services. We will continue to read The Old Man and the Sea and Mrs. Dalloway while being completely satisfied in our ignorance of the writer, the man, the woman, the being that may have given it all for us at the price of their own lives and importance as mortals.
Read entire article at The End is Coming (Blog)
In the past centuries, one profession and group of people are assuredly remembered more than the rest: writers. Mostly because their names are affixed to a piece of literature, poetry, music, history or fiction, it is a name that will live on as long as succeeding generations deem the works “classic”. That being said, what of the man? Surely a writer is embodied with his work but the recent passing of two literary greats has shown us that the writer himself becomes banal, unimportant even, as he completes his cycle on earth.
Penning The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, JD Salinger gave us Holden Caulfield as the very first troubled adolescent soul that spawned the Taxi Drivers, Rebels Without a Cause and much of the past decade in fiction. Both taught and banned in schools worldwide, the book was an instant classic and gave Salinger de facto immortality. The man behind the book however continued to exist for almost sixty years, living the life of an eccentric recluse that rarely spoke in public and almost never released another word he wrote. He died at the age of 91 as a forgotten man yet as an unforgettable author. We cared little for his life and, with the media frenzy over Afghanistan and Haiti showed little interest in his death.
On the very same day, Howard Zinn passed away at the age of 87. Publishing A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Zinn was a left-wing historian that has been called “visionary” by some and “socialist” by others. His ultimate work is still taught in the USA as a different and more populist take on their national history and around the world as a model of the unconventional retelling of history. Zinn continued to live in the public eye after the release of his work. In fact, he was touring talk shows and collaborating with Hollywood stars just last autumn working on another “people’s” History. Despite this continuous devotion to historical dissent and philosophical activism, Zinn passed without much rumbling on news services while historical circles still cry the death of a wonderful writer and/or brilliant adversary.
The imagination of both these men set them apart as some of the greatest lateral thinkers in recent history. Now dead, we are made to wonder if the lives of these writers were as important as their works, and indeed, as their legacies.
Well, only time can tell what, if and how we will remember Howard Zinn and JD Salinger. All we can do for now is to reminisce about the passing of other great writers and how their timely deaths were at times publicised and chagrined and at others trivial and wholly forgettable.
William Shakespeare was definitely notorious and celebrated in his time but the end of his lifelong career has been of little interest to anyone except his biographers. He wrote but a few collaborations in the last decade of his life and died, a shadow of a man, weakened by age. He left a wife and two daughters, both of whom never bore a son. Shakespeare the oeuvre lives on but Shakespeare the man and bloodline were no more by the mid 1600s.
George Orwell notoriously wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen-eighty-four. Beyond these visionary and incisive pieces of work, Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) died in 1950 at the relatively young age of 46, crippled by health problems. Famed science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L Ron Hubbard enjoyed a fair bit of fame before ending their writing careers and retreating to finish their lives in disease and substance abuse. It should be mentioned that Asimov died in 1992 of an HIV infection contracted during a blood transfusion, condemning his family to complete silence about his legacy (until some of the HIV/AIDS taboo was lifted) whereas Hubbard’s works have spawned the Church of Scientology and had made him over half a billion dollars in wealth by the time of his death in 1986.
Finally, there are the writers that left us legendary pieces of literature and accordingly suffered from tortured souls and twisted lives. Dostoyevsky dies penniless and in deep depression due to an intense gambling addiction as late 1800s Russia enjoyed the Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Mark Twain spiralled into depression as family and friends died around him and as he stubbornly continued to live despite a healthy life-long tobacco and alcohol intake. He finally left us in 1910 at the age of 75. More disturbed still were the writers that left us in their prime. The Hemingways, Plaths, Dickinsons and Woolfs that withered away, imprisoned in their own tortured psyche and whom finally took their own lives. They understood that the public had used them and no longer needed their services. We will continue to read The Old Man and the Sea and Mrs. Dalloway while being completely satisfied in our ignorance of the writer, the man, the woman, the being that may have given it all for us at the price of their own lives and importance as mortals.