BackWhy no writer can match Salinger’s voice
Why no writer can match Salinger’s voice
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Jerome David Salinger, who died last month at age 91, would approve. He, along with Ayn Rand, inspires hyperbole and cultish devotion. Their books achieve the troika that every aspiring author longs for: original, long-lasting best-sellers. Best of all, not only are their books and characters unforgettable (remember Howard Roark?), they are immensely readable. How many of us have finished Moby Dick beyond that most memorable of first lines: “Call me Ishmael"? How many of us, even those who cop to the literati label, have read Proust, Tolstoy, Tagore, or Hemingway—not the abstracts or reviews but the books? Generations of college students on the other hand read Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged from cover to cover. Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan converted from being a “logical positivist" to Rand’s “objectivist" philosophy. Would it be a reach to say that Greenspan’s Rand-inspired belief in the infallibility of free markets caused the slowdown?
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