The news that J.D. Salinger had died, finally, at the age of ninety-one, on January 27, while not shocking in the abrupt manner of deaths such as Elvis’s or Michael Jackson’s or Heath Ledger’s, still had its J.F.K. moment. I learned of it driving home from work: on NPR I tuned into a segment about the enduring importance of “The Catcher in the Rye” and what Holden Caulfield had meant for fifty-nine years and counting to both readers and writers; I suspected the time had come—for years, I had wondered aloud what the response to Salinger’s death would be in an era where even celebrities’ fifteen minutes of fame is increasingly truncated—but not until the announcer ended with the statement did I feel that frisson of finality. At home, there were several phone messages from friends calling to mention the news; and when I Googled “Salinger” I found the Internet had, in just hours of the news, already filed several hundred items. In the age of tweets and blogs, no man, however reluctantly, is an island.

Nowadays, a writer’s death is hard-pressed to be seen not merely as newsworthy but noteworthy. John Updike, who as the fates would have it died on the same day as Salinger one year earlier, was another of those out-of-the-blue deaths (he had kept his illness quiet, working right up to the last) that reached out to a wide swath of admirers. Some of the grief was over what Updike’s passing represented: after the deaths of Bellow, Cheever, Mailer, William Maxwell, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison, that generation of writers who were as close to the Bible as to the writer’s bible “The New Yorker,” a generation imprinted by two world wars and the Depression, whose own experiences were turned into indelible images, a whole way of life is at an end. Though Philip Roth, at seventy-seven, is the last man standing, Salinger’s death brings this epic time to its epilogue.

Salinger bridged the gap between Hemingway and the writers who came after him in a way that neither Mailer nor Kerouac did; Salinger’s voice was not only the voice of his, post-Second World War generation, but of generation after generation’s. His slangy tart tone is the most imitated after Hemingway’s. When I have made visits to high schools to discuss the importance of the classics to students, I try to make the point that reading acts as part of a collective consciousness; I reel off famous opening lines from such novels as “David Copperfield,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Anna Karenina,” asking the students to call out the titles if they recognize them, and I always end with one more, which begins: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all that before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Though Dickens and Tolstoy have their better and worse days before bored students, long before I get to the famous end of that famous opening line there is always a crowd of waving arms.

Though adults seemed hypnotized by Salinger’s lengthy silence from publishing and the public—his last published work, the lengthy short story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in 1965; his last of three interviews given over his entire lifetime was in 1980— to younger readers Salinger the celebrity was less important than Salinger the author. None of the high school students I have ever met with have brought up his withdrawal from the spotlight; to many, he might be as ancient as Dickens, but the difference is that to them Salinger is not as dead as Dickens.

The ability to drill into the collective unconscious of young people is special, as authors from Dickens to Twain to J.K. Rowling have illustrated. Yet Salinger’s fiction is sophisticated and reads more smoothly than in memory. One of his earliest stories, “Go See Eddie,” published in 1940, in UMKC’s literary magazine “New Letters” (then called “Kansas City Review”) displays even then his talent for dialogue as both satirical and spiritual. It led the way for writers like Joseph Heller and Roth, whose modern characters Yossarian and Alexander Portnoy would be hard to imagine without Holden Caulfield courageously (and outrageously) leading the way.

Salinger’s silence all those years turns out to be not as absolute as the myth of Salinger’s silence. Scattered reports throughout the years indicated that he was still writing—the author himself admitted as much late in life, emphasizing the love of writing, rather than further involvement in the publishing process—but somehow it was whipped up into a mystery of all-but-conspiratorial proportions. There is a long history of writers remaining silent: Emily Dickinson’s entire career was all but unknown silence to the outside world in the nineteenth-century; Melville’s last years were mostly silent, after the terrible reception to “Moby-Dick”; Thomas Pynchon’s Cheshire Cat act has always been a kind of doppelgänger’s version of Salinger’s reclusiveness; and, of course, Ralph Ellison’s decades-long attempt to produce a second novel after his celebrated 1952 masterpiece “Invisible Man”—in 1967 most of the manuscript burned in a house fire—offers a more pathetic parallel to Salinger’s evidently contented daily work pace.

If Salinger ran from his readers, it was not his fault. Authors either embrace their audiences like Dickens with his speaking tours and Twain in his white suit, or challenge them as Mailer did in his role as a public intellectual, or take the third path of least resistance—ducking out. Like Salinger, Kerouac, too, was quickly overwhelmed by his public, and, less steel-tempered, retreated into himself through drink and exhaustion at being a legend in his lifetime. Both authors attempted to copy what Huck speaks about in the final sentences of his tall tale: “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Salinger was there, and then not there. It was always a writer’s choice.