J.D. Salinger, 91

“After one brilliant novel, a novella and a couple of dozen short stories, he turned his back on the cult hunger for his writing and after 1965 refused to publish further. He guarded his privacy so fiercely that he sued to keep his words out of print. Whether a cover-up for writer’s block or the ultimate expression of the alienation that defined his most famous protagonist, Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s stubborn silence only enlarged the cult.”