"You know that song, 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'?..."

"What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse. "

This weekend, the world says goodbye to one of the most instrumental artists of all time: The great JD Salinger. I say "artist" instead of "author" because of the pure literary genius he possessed. Born in 1919, Salinger began writing stories when his father, with whom he had a strained relationship, sent him to a military academy in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, after he dropped out of McBurney private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In World War II, Salinger eagerly joined the military, wherein he experienced the horrors of the holocaust and experienced a period of convalescence. When The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, some speculated that it was this proverbial mental breakdown that Salinger had documented in the form of a 48-hour time period in the life of Holden Caulfield. The book became wildly popular with teens, college students, and even (though sadly) murderers. But despite the controversial backlash Salinger experienced because of his work, Catcher still remains an exquisite American classic.

After the publication of Catcher, Salinger retreated into solitude, publishing only three more books, but his family now states that 15 or more Salinger manuscripts exist.

In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger penned, all those years ago:

"Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."

In this statement, Salinger's entire "phony" construction is broken down into just what he desires: to be missed dearly. And I can promise he certainly will be.