Catcher in the Rye

On July 16, 1951, J. D. Salinger published A Catcher In The Rye. He was 32. He'd created the character of Holden Caulfield ten years earlier, and The New Yorker was about to publish the first Holden story when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Salinger would take part in the Normandy landings, fight in the Battle of the Bulge and meet Ernest Hemingway in Paris before he saw New York again. Salinger appears six times in A Book of Ages. I believe J. D. Salinger is the only American novelist to ever lose a girlfriend to Charlie Chaplin or to serve as a recreation director aboard a cruise ship.

Anne Frank

On June 6, 1944, 14 year-old Anne Frank is listening to the radio, in the secret annex at the address in Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, and hears the voice of General Eisenhower announcing the invasion of Europe. She records the news in her diary: “I have the feeling that friends are approaching.”

Anne Frank appears on pages 7, 29, 33, 35 and 45 in A Book of Ages.

D-Day

On June 5, 1944, 53 year-old Dwight Eisenhower knew that his success or failure in life, and the entire future of the free world, hinged upon the weather over the English Channel the next morning. In his pocket he had a carefully-worded address explaining his decision, and was prepared to take full responsibility for what happened next.

This might be my favorite entry in A Book of Ages, because it is a book about decisions and moments that become watersheds. Everything turned out all right. The weather was good, the Germans had been fooled enough by the allies' various deceptions to deploy fewer troops above Omaha and Utah beaches than they might have. The war was won on that day, or we knew it would eventually be won. Eisenhower went on to be an affable, grandfatherly president of a prosperous country enjoying its bounty and worried about very little but the mortgage and the possibility of complete annihilation by Communists.