According to his son, the author, who lived a rather reclusive life, died at the age of 91 of natural causes in his New Hampshire home.

I remember Catcher in the Rye being a subject of controversy, one of those books that my parents didn’t want me to read, it was about a rebellious teenager during the 1950′s (I was born in 1951) and had things in it they didn’t think I needed to fill my mind with.  I did eventually read it, and I suppose they were right.  Filling the mind with a story about a character, Holden Caulfield, who tended to have a self-destructive personality, experienced periods of depression, suffered a nervous breakdown, could be fairly vulgar at times, and explored sex, to name a few things, was probably not the best thing to be filling my mind with…and to imagine what teens are filling their minds with now…well don’t suppose I want to go there right now, that’s a subject for another day.

The book is still widely read today, I think (but am not sure) it may even be on reading lists, and read as part of English classes in public schools.

The author chose to live a life out of the public eye to the extreme, not doing interviews and fighting against biographical writings about his life.  That life has now ended at the age of 91.