/lit/ - Literature

Why did he stop writing bros? :(

>i'm in the starbucks, reading finnegans wake
>this kind of cute girl walks up to me
>i'm already getting kind of sexy. i'm a horndog sometimes. you know how girls make you. but i start getting the goddamn shakes, too, for some reason. not because i'm yellow or nothing, cause i'm not. i just start shaking. sometimes i shake. i don't know why i do it, but i do.
>"Hey! You're reading Finnegans Wake? Is it any good?"
>"I-I think you'll find Finnegans Wake transcends the normative good-bad dichotomy, actually"
>she says she doesn't know what i'm saying.
>all girls are a little air-headed, you know. they're all the goddamn same. this one is a little air-headed too, i can tell, but i'm half in love with her all the same. you know how it is. a girl comes up to you and asks about finnegans wake and you just sort of fall in love with her.
>so what i do is, i snort a bit. just a little. just to show her that it was a little funny, what she said. in a cute way. you would've snorted too if you'd been there. you would've.
>as i'm snorting coffee starts coming out of my nose, along with one tiny string of spaghetti. just one. can you believe it? you snort a bit and goddamn coffee and spaghetti comes out of your goddamn nose.
>i don't know what to do. i mean, i'm not panicking or nothing. some guys would panic in that situation but not me. i'm suave. real suave. suave as hell, sometimes. i just sort of take the tablecloth and bring it up to my nose and blow into it, all suave as hell.
>it doesn't make it better though. if anything it makes it worse. you know how these things are. you do one thing wrong and everything just snowballs. a bunch more spaghetti starts coming out of my nose. i'm leaking spaghetti like a bastard.

JD Salinger is the greatest American writer of all time. No others compare.

What Twain and Faulkner did for the South, Salinger did for the North. Holden's narration was at least as innovative in American literature as Huck's narration and the plethora of narrations from TSATF & AILD.

>inb4 Faulkner was more prolific
>inb4 Twain & Faulkner were wiser about America

Don't forget all of Salinger's short stories and the vein of the Glass family running through them, and his love of including things like notebooks and letters (Phoebe's, Franny's, Esme's (all written by women --- something Faulkner & Twain could never do with success) etc…)

As for wisdom, Twain never went beyond satire and skepticism, and got along well with the same rich people he satirized since he was famous in his lifetime. Faulkner stopped at the homely superstition, simplicity, and religion of black folks and outsiders. Salinger advocated complete religious/psychological detachment from the world and only attaching yourself to the young and innocent in order to protect them. And unlike Twain and Faulkner, he actually saw war. (Faulkner was too short to join the American army).

>inb4 "what about---"
There's no other candidates besides Twain, Faulkner, or Salinger. Sorry. Even if you bring them up, I'll still be able to clearly tell you how Salinger bests them.

One example of Salinger's depths:
According to medical science, a vitamin B-12 deficiency or problems with your pituitary or thyroid gland can cause premature graying of the hair that’s reversible if the problem is corrected.

>It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head--the right side-- is full of millions of gray hairs. I've had them ever since I was a kid.
>But this damn article I started reading made me feel almost worse. It was all about hormones. It described how you should look, your face and eyes and all, if your hormones were in good shape, and I didn't look that way at all. I looked exactly like the guy in the article with lousy hormones. So I started getting worried about my hormones.

Are Salinger's other things that aren't Catcher In the Rye worth reading?

>>5057230
>I channel my war-related grief into a story about a young boy losing his innocence from time to time

Really? No Salinger?