Salinger

By David Shields and Shane Salerno

Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people-and published in coordination with the international theatrical release of a major documentary film from the Weinstein Company-The Private War of J.D. Salingeris a global cultural event: the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century.

For more than fifty years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Ryehas been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. Salinger remains, astonishingly, an enigma. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed.

No longer.

In the eight years since The Private War of J.D. Salingerwas begun, and especially in the three years since Salinger's death, the authors interviewed on five continents more than 200 people, 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 Yorkercolleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last fifty-six years of Salinger's life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to never-before-published photographs (more than 100 throughout the book), diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, readers will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger's meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781471130403

David Shields

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.

Reviews for Salinger

[y2ash · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was a journey for me to read. Many other books got in the way that delayed me. Salinger is a great companion piece to the documentary that played in theatres earlier in the year. It dove into greater detail about J.D. Salinger and his very complicated life. I can understand the reviewers who did not like it. The information in Salinger has been around for years. The only new revelations was probably that J.D. Salinger did leave unpublished works in a safe that would only be released after his death. Salinger specifies that it would be between 2015 and 2020.

Many fans complained that, in both the book and documentary, that a lot of the information was regurgitated. They have heard it all before. However, I wasn't a die-hard fan of J.D. Salinger's even though I really enjoyed Catcher in the Rye. Honestly, when I heard he died back in 2010, I already thought he was dead for some time. My point is, that for a newcomer, Salinger succeeds. Salerno and Shields did a fine job using biographical, outsider interviews, and their own theories to describe the view of the author.

My view is that J.D. Salinger was a very complicated man who was suffering from a very potent case of PTSD. He didn't or couldn't acclimate to civilian life. He was sort of like a prisoner being released and having no aftercare program to help him transition. He found solace in two things: writing (he wrote the first 6 chapters of Catcher in the War) and in the Vedanta religion. J.D. Salinger was a very introverted dark man to begin with, and to be put in that kind of environment of war, caused him to retreat further into himself.

His attraction to very young girls was disturbing. I'm not sure if it was because that before the War, he had Oona O'Neill and everything was kind of hopeful for him. Every young girl ranging from Jean Miller to Joyce Maynard was a futile attempt to get back to it. His old treatment of them when they didn't meet his standards, I believe, was a way to get back at Oona for the treatment she showed him. She started ignoring his letters when she met Charlie Chaplin. Then Salinger found out from an Army comrade of his that she eventually married Chaplin. That was cold.

Unfortunately, many of J.D. Salinger's feelings are speculative. They were based on what others thought he would feel. I would have like to know how he really felt when people were using Catcher in the Rye as a coda for killing innocent people. Any work of art can be twisted to fit the needs of the beholder. It must have been disheartening to see something that worked so hard on and that saved his life being construed that way.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Honestly, before reading Salinger, the new J.D. Salinger biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno, I knew very little about the author’s personal life. Sure, I had read most of Salinger’s published works and I was well aware of his obsessively reclusive lifestyle, but that was about it. And, frankly, now that I’ve read this 700-page biography, I almost wish I hadn’t because much of what I learned about Salinger is not pretty.Salinger is an “oral biography,” one of those hybrid pieces of writing in which personal recollections and opinions are collected from dozens and dozens of people and sorted into supposedly coherent chapters to move the story chronologically forward. Observers are quoted in credited paragraphs, one after the other, with occasional interjections by Shields and Salerno to tie things together or clarify an issue. The style takes a little getting used to and never achieves the authoritative feel that comes from a traditional, well footnoted, biography. It should be noted, too, that the book is filled with interesting, informative photographs that add greatly to a feel for Salinger and what he was really like.I am not going to discuss or reveal any of the aspects of Salinger’s life and personality that were new to me (several of which I find both sad and rather disturbing) because I am guessing that many potential readers of the biography will be as uniformed about Salinger’s personal life as I was coming into the book. What I will say is that Salinger is a clear look at J.D. Salinger’s life whether it is true that, as is claimed by its authors, much of the information has never been revealed before, or not. What I will also say is that it contains one of the worst pieces of writing I have ever suffered through, an attempt by David Shields to get directly into Salinger’s head (eleven pages of the “Follow the Bullet: Nine Stories” chapter). That piece of dreamlike gibberish makes for truly painful reading. A Charles McGrath quote from page 554 sums up the way most readers are likely to feel after finishing Salinger: “Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art.” I do not think J.D. Salinger was the American Tolstoy.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It seems like a lot of critics didn't like this much-hyped book much in part because its wide-ranging oral history format made it seem like a lazy “cut and paste” job. I was not sure that I'd like the format that much either, but once I got into it, I found it a readable, if overly padded, work. Others have criticized it for taking a "tabloid-style" approach to the Salinger's life,but my sensibilities weren't offended all that much. I dd find their interpretations of Salinger's life and work oversimplified, but, no one said I had to agree with them.The authors move quickly past J.D. Salinger's childhood and "all that David Copperfield crap" to get to their simplistic central thesis: Salinger suffered from a lifelong case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brought about by his combat service in World War II and the loss of his first love, Oona O’Neill, who married Charlie Chaplin while Salinger was away at war. These experiences changed him from an ambitious young writer whose goal was publication in the "slicks" (fashionable magazines like the New Yorker) to a man who famously avoided contact with the world outside his writing bunker. His wartime experiences, which included the liberation of a concentration camp, showed him the worst side of humanity. His religious beliefs--he was first a follower of Zen Buddhism, and later devoted to Vedanta Hinduism-- also encouraged his withdrawal from the world. But even though he carefully cultivated a reclusive image, and withheld his work from publication from 1963 onward, he was never really as isolated as he wanted his readers to believe. He wrote letters, interacted with his neighbors in his adopted hometown of Cornish, NH, read newspapers daily, and had a large satellite dish for TV reception. Throughout the “reclusive” portion of his life, he sought out (via mail) many teenage girls, most of whom bore at least a passing resemblance (petite, dark hair, broad smile) to the young Oona O'Neill. He convinced many of these young women that they were his soul mates (“landsmen”), but when they aged beyond the crucial moment ("the cusp of womanhood”), he replaced them with new girls. He was also married three times, and had two children. His son remembers Salinger as a good father; his daughter does not.Salinger does not present a flattering portrait of its subject. It is also not a work of scholarship--it doesn't have an index, and some of its contributors are questionable (how did the actress Lindsay Crouse get in here? Shields and Salerno don't tell us). The authors spend far too many pages on topics that are only tangentially related to Salinger's work--for example, the book contains an unnecessary, moment-by-moment recounting of John Lennon's murder. In Shields and Salerno’s telling, J.D. Salinger was a man of many contradictions and even hypocrisy. His most famous fictional character, Holden Caulfield, might have called his creator a “phony”. I have the impression that exposing Salinger's own "phoniness" is just what the authors set out to do, and they neatly tailored their biography accordingly.

[velopunk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting biography. Salinger was a shell shocked, PTSD, victim. Dated Oona O'Neill and always preferred young women.

[marssie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book because of its style. When the information was there for me to draw my own conclusions it was wonderful. When it preached and repeated for "reinforcement" purposes it was a bit tedious. I'm glad I read it and although I found that I do not like Salinger the man, I can still enjoy the work of Salinger the reclusive writer. There's exhaustive research that could have been boring but was pulled back at the brink every time - good editing.

[mmignano11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

[Salinger] by [[David Shields]] and [[Shane Salerno]]This audiobook was chock full of information on the author's life. I found myself going back often to listen again to much of the information. The authors offered up the information in the form of commentary from many people who knew Salinger personally and also writers and others who benefited from the scholarship that has made up much of what is known of Salinger, who was a most private man. In addition to facts about him, there is included speculation about his legacy. The rumors that he spent the 45 years of his self-imposed seclusion writing has been pondered by many writers and scholars on the subject. According to Shields and Salerno, it is a documented fact that Salinger's writing will begin to be released in 2015 and will continue to be released irregularly until 2020, by his son Matthew and his wife at the time of his death Colleen Salinger, the executors of his literary estate. The writings will consist of mainly the continuation of his writings of the Caulfield family and the Glass family. I found the re-telling of the years that Salinger spent during the war particularly poignant as he was involved in five bloody battles that he survived while many others did not, and that proved both his undoing and probably the basis of much of his writing. Not surprisingly, he experienced PTSD and much of his young life was effectively tainted by the suffering this caused him. His withdrawal from society, and his relationships with the women in his life were tainted by his need to control the circumstances he found himself in rather than adjusting to the situations. If those around him could not adjust themselves to his needs he retreated from any kind of interaction with them. He was a deeply troubled person, but was sought after and cared for by those who did manage to find a way into his cloistered life.I found it deeply disturbing that [Catcher In the Rye] was connected to so many twisted personalities, such as Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon, the young man who shot Rebecca Schaeffer, and Jody Foster's stalker, who eventually attempted to shoot Ronald Regan. They were each discovered to have a copy of Catcher, as though it was their Bible, the handbook they somehow connected to their alienation from society, and the meaning behind the sordid actions they took. I think it was the appeal of the alienated youth, who could not find his niche in the world he found himself in, rather than any subliminal message the story held. Salinger could write perfectly about how it felt to hold one's self apart, to belong nowhere, and to resent the phoniness in others, while sensing that it may be your own inability to be true to yourself that makes you sensitive to the same thing in others. To a man already psychologically wounded by the ravages of war, this would have been a death blow. Given the painful publicity, the survivor's guilt would have been intensified for Salinger. This audiobook chronicles Salinger's life, speculates and validates what is known of his constant seeking for something to anchor him, which would turn out to be the Vedantic religion, which he studied and followed for much of his life. It delivers on all fronts, based as it is on the opinions and observations of so many different people who knew Salinger, or knew either the life of a writer or experienced the war years themselves. It was long, but worth the effort , and I feel I know a great deal about Salinger, the man and the writer, something I knew next to nothing about before listening to the audiobook. I highly recommend it.

[etxgardener · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an ambitious project: interviews with over 200 people over nine years. The result is an interesting, although because of its oral history format, somewhat disjointed picture of the famously elusive author of Catcher in the Rye and many stories of the Glas family.Salinger was undoubtedly a brilliant writer, publishing his first story in Story magazine when he was just 21 years old and getting a "first look" contract with The New Yorker before the age of 30. However, his very bad war during World War II (initial assault on D-Day, the battle of Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge & stumbling into a Nazi death camp) left him with a severe case of PTSD before anyone knew what that was.. His penchant for very young girls - precipitated by his relationship with Oona O'Neill in the late 1930's and early 1940's - also added to his strange personality.Was his retreat to Cornish, New Hampshire sincere, or just a ruse to get attention for himself? Is there a vault of stories waiting to be published? Maybe the fact that we're asking about question #2 answers question #1.

[madamepince · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Spoiler alert: Salinger was not a nice guy. However, the descriptions of World War II were compelling.