J. D. Salinger

Salinger was born in Manhattan to a Jewish father in the meat-importing business and an Irish-Catholic mother, and bounced through several prep schools before Valley Forge Military Academy. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, fought through the Battle of the Bulge, and helped liberate a concentration camp, carrying pages of The Catcher in the Rye through the campaign, by his own account.

The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, made him instantly and permanently famous, a fame he came to loathe. By 1953 he had retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire, stopped granting interviews, and spent the following decades suing to block unauthorized biographies and a sequel that imagined Holden Caulfield grown old.

He kept writing privately for the rest of his life; nothing new appeared before his death in 2010, and none of the reportedly finished manuscripts have been published since.