Happy 100th Birthday to J.D. Salinger

Son of NYC, brilliant author, and legendary recluse J.D. Salinger turned 100 yesterday.

Yes, he's been dead for almost 10 years but his work (Catcher in the Rye, the Glass family stories, etc.) will live forever.

What made Salinger's writing revolutionary at the time it was published in the late 1940s and early 1950s was how raw and fresh it was -- he wrote about deeply flawed, unapologetically awful people in a prose style that was unsentimental, totally modern, and shockingly real. His characters were repellent yet deeply sympathetic at the same time, and he was really the first author whose writing spoke to the post-World War II, rock'n'roll generation. Holden Caufield, nearly 70 years old now, remains an iconic characters of rebellion -- the ultimate NYC teenager. 

And if J.D. Salinger was alive today, he'd probably love the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as much I and so many others do -- a show about a foul-mouthed NYC female comic in 1950s NYC. This big interview with the show's star about how this should could only be done in NYC is fascinating -- and how this city gives her the right access to "the rage" needed to play a trailblazing character. 

Holden would probably have gone to one of her shows.