J.D. Salinger and my Facebook friends

My Facebook news feed, modest with my 147 "friends" or so, erupted today with the news of J.D. Salinger's death, before I'd even seen the obit on the New York Times web front page, which I check far more compulsively than Facebook. I have never seen this much outpouring of "RIP JD. S." or various quotes from an author's work. I saw one "RIP Howard Zinn" yesterday, which really I don't take too seriously. But to each his or her own. My friends in life and, reflected in that, my contacts on Facebook are a random smattering of the extraordinarily literate: writers, English graduate students, etc. and blue collar/service industry folks, all of whom I share something in common with in my own background. (And of course, my favorite people are somewhere in the middle, like restaurant people with master's degrees.) Anyway, when John Updike died last year, I recall very little in the way of any of my Facebook contacts even noticing. David Foster Wallace got a couple more pings, but only from young writers I know, people in graduate school. I'll admit, a lot of my writer friends are sometimes a bit reclusive themselves and hardly effusive on the social networks, but my point is: people from all walks of life went onto Facebook to spread their grief over the death of this American literary icon today.

And that's what he is, and probably the last one. Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer, both very, very important American writers who died in recent years, and there's dozens more, but I wonder how far their reach really went with "regular people" my age. That is, it seems as though every-goddam-body picked up a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and read it when they were teenagers, and if they didn't read it then, they read it later. I know that isn't true, and that plenty of people outside of the literary discipline have read Slaughterhouse Five, and dozens and dozens of other important books that I have yet to read (for instance, I've never read anything by Dos Passos... it's on my list). But who else is still alive who has written a work of American literature as important to as many people as Salinger? Works in the class of Huck Finn, or The Great Gatsby.

Shit... I just realized that Harper Lee is still alive (and eerily similar to Salinger in her publication record and famed reclusiveness), so really my point is losing whatever slight bit of merit it may have had. I can only continue to brainstorm about who else out there is still kicking (I'm pretty sure I had something dismissive lined up to say about Roth's importance on this scale). If you've read this rambling nonsense this far, sorry to have wasted your time. But I'm going to hit "publish" anyway. It's my blog and I'll rant if I want to. I'm going back to Facebook now.