J.D. Salinger published his first story in The New Yorker at age
twenty-nine. Three years later came The Catcher in The Rye, a novel
that has sold more than sixty-five million copies and achieved mythic
status since its publication in 1951. Subsequent books introduced a new
type in contemporary literature: the introspective, hyperarticulate
Glass family, whose stage is the Upper East Side. Yet we still know
little about Salinger's personal life and less about his character.
This was by design. In 1953, determined to escape media attention,
Salinger fled to New Hampshire, where he would live until his death in
2010. Even there, privacy proved elusive: a Time cover story; a memoir
by Joyce Maynard (who dropped out of Yale as a freshman to move in with
him); and a legal battle over an unauthorized biography, which darkened
his last decades. Yet he continued to write, and is rumored to have left
behind a mass of work that his estate intends to publish.
Thomas Beller, a novelist who grew up in Manhattan, is the ideal guide
to Salinger's world. He gives us a sense of life at The New Yorker
(where he was once a staff writer) and a portrait of editor Gus Lobrano,
whose relationship with Salinger has rarely been written about. He
visits Salinger's summer camp and the apartment buildings where the
author lived. He reads the famous works with obsessive attention,
finding in them an image of his own life experience. The result is a
quest biography about learning to know yourself in order to know your
subject. J.D. Salinger is the triumph of a rare literary form:
biography as work of art.
