Chris Bond: Salinger's literary legacy will live on in his troubled creation

Catcher in the Rye is one such book. JD Salinger's rites-of-passage tale of a disaffected student drop-out trying to deflect life's slings and arrows on the streets of New York, is regarded as one of the 20th-century's great works of fiction.

The reclusive author's death, last week, at the age of 91, cast him and his famous book back into the spotlight. As tributes poured in, many commentators preferred to dissect Salinger's peculiar life of self-imposed exile on his New Hampshire farm, rather than his literary legacy.

In fact, some critics have argued that had it not been for his eccentricities, he would have dropped off the radar (and curriculum) long ago.

It's certainly true that where there are no hard facts to fall upon, fiction soon follows. Dubbed "the recluse in the rye", rumours about him surfaced every couple of years, including one bizarre suggestion that he and another literary recluse, Thomas Pynchon, were actually one and the same.

None of which sheds any light on the enduring appeal of his novels, and in particular Catcher in the Rye.

In creating the book's troubled protagonist, Holden Caulfield, Salinger single-handedly invented the teenager. Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, before the advent of rock 'n' roll and Elvis, and before James Dean careered off a Californian highway and into legend.

Caulfield was the prototype rebel without a cause, and, through him, Salinger articulates with compelling accuracy the self-obsession, anger and frustration that many teenagers feel as they stand on the brink of adulthood and look out on to a not-so-brave-world.

I first read the book as an impressionable 16-year-old and found in Caulfield a persuasive voice that cut out "all that David Copperfield kind of crap", as he himself says.

It proved to be Salinger's magnum opus, although he is not the only example of a writer whose reputation rests on the shoulders of one book.

Ralph Ellison never made it beyond Invisible Man, while Scott Fitzgerald was haunted for the rest of his short life by The Great Gatsby, the brilliance of which he could never repeat. To Kill A Mockingbird is another profoundly beautiful, life-changing book, but since her blistering debut Harper Lee hasn't produced another novel and now, in her mid-80s, has withdrawn from public life.

There are many gifted writers who enjoy successful careers without ever producing a masterpiece, although creating one can sometimes prove as much a curse as a kiss.

It has been said that there are no second acts in American lives and perhaps just as Hunter S Thompson was the counter culture's gonzo king, so JD Salinger will be remembered as the great poet of adolescence – his defining work one that will be read for the rest of time.