Salinger - Softcover

Shields, David; Salerno, Shane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476744858 ISBN 13: 9781476744858

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Synopsis

An instant New York Times bestseller, this “explosive biography” (People) of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century is “as close as we’ll ever get to being inside J.D. Salinger’s head” (Entertainment Weekly).

This “revealing” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (The Wall Street Journal) oral biography, “fascinating and unique” (The Washington Post) and “an unmitigated success” (USA TODAY), has redefined our understanding of one of the most mysterious figures of the twentieth century.

In nine years of work on Salinger, and especially in the years since the author’s death, David Shields and Shane Salerno interviewed more than 200 people on five continents, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger’s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Their intimate recollections are supported by more that 175 photos (many never seen before), diaries, legal records, and private documents that are woven throughout; in addition, appearing here for the first time, are Salinger’s “lost letters”—ranging from the 1940s to 2008, revealing his intimate views on love, literature, fame, religion, war, and death, and providing a raw and revelatory self-portrait.

The result is “unprecedented” (Associated Press), “genuinely valuable” (Time), and “strips away the sheen of [Salinger’s] exceptionalism, trading in his genius for something much more real” (Los Angeles Times). According to the Sunday Times of London, Salinger is “a stupendous work...I predict with the utmost confidence that, after this, the world will not need another Salinger biography.”

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2013: Salinger-ians – those who are obsessed with the fabulously successful and famously reclusive Catcher in the Rye author– will find much to argue about in this oral history by filmmaker Shane Salerno (whose related movie is released September 6) and co-writer David Shields. According to the authors and the dozens of people they interviewed, Salinger was an adolescent-girl-obsessed, religious fanatic who suffered from a kind of lifelong PTSD from his years in WWII as well as an embarrassing (to him) physical deformity; he also, according to the authors, used his reclusiveness to his own advantage, stepping out to the press and public when it suited him and the mythology they contend he at least partially created. But even those who couldn’t care less about “the finest mind ever to stay in prep school,” (Norman Mailer) will find themselves surprisingly engaged: from snippets about Salinger’s thwarted love affair with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, who dumped him for Charlie Chaplin to a lit-crit lesson on how Mark David Chapman could have possibly read Catcher as a manifesto urging him to kill John Lennon, this book says more than most about the world of writing, celebrity and American culture in the 20th century. --Sara Nelson

From the Author

David Shields is the author of fifteen books, including the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead; Reality Hunger, named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications; and Black Planet, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

Shane Salerno is the director, producer, and writer of Salinger, which premiered theatrically in 2013 from the Weinstein Company and will debut as the 200th episode of American Masters on PBS in early 2014. In addition to Salinger, Salerno has written and produced a number of successful films and TV series. He most recently co-wrote and served as executive producer of the critically acclaimed film Savages, directed by three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone. 

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1476744858
• ISBN 13: 9781476744858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 720