1 post tagged “oher”

OXFORD, Miss. — This quaint Southern college town is known as a literary oasis, a reputation it gained as the home of William Faulkner for a majority of his life. For much of its existence, theUniversity of Mississippi’s football program has led its own tale of Southern toil, trying mostly in vain to catch up with its peers in the Southeastern Conference.

So it is only fitting that with Mississippi preparing to play Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl on Friday, one of the linchpins behind the Rebels’ storybook turnaround is a literary star himself.

Michael Oher, Ole Miss’s left tackle, was profiled in Michael Lewis’s best-selling book “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” a riveting tale of Oher’s climb from one of Memphis’s worst ghettos to stardom.

On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.

Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.