Happy Birthday J.D.

     For you literary types or just plain students of the American novel, today would have been the 96th birthday of our own J. D. Salinger, author of-----------Catcher in the Rye! Yes, that J.D. Salinger. author of the 2nd most read book in schools.  What is also mostly known is that he became a recluse, living out his life in obscurity in New Hampshire.   What is not commonly known is that he was a war veteran, landing at Omaha Beach in Normandy in 1944 and fighting his way across France, involved in that ferocious counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge where Allied forces suffered the most casualties of the war, and then was involved in the liberation of the death camp at Dachau.   As a result of his "battle fatigue" or "shell shock" or "post traumatic stress syndrome", he was hospitalized when he returned to the States after hostilities.  He continued to write, without much further success and he never moved back into what we would now call mainstream life.