J.D. Salinger
Subtitle: the escape artist
By: Thomas Beller
Series: Icons; Icons series (New Harvest (Firm))
Publisher: New Harvest, Houghtin Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 181
ISBN-13: 9780544261990
Subjects: Literary; Biography; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY; 20th Century; American Authors; HISTORY
Description: "Three years after his death at ninety-one, J.D. Salinger remains our most mythic writer. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) became an American classic, and he was for a long time the writer for The New Yorker. Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters introduced, by way of the Glass family, a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, voluble cast of characters whose stage is the Upper East Side of New York. But fame proved a burden, and in 1963 Salinger fled to New Hampshire, spending the next half century in isolation. Beller has followed his subject's trail, from his Park Avenue childhood to his final refuge, barnstorming across New England to visit various Salinger shrines, interviewing just about everyone alive who ever knew Salinger. The result is a quest biography in the tradition of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, a book as much about the biographer as about the subject--two vivid, entertaining stories in one"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: 1923: On running away; title: The gift; title: Lost; title: 1930s: Ham and cheese; title: The Myron arms; title: Comanches; title: 1932: McBurney and Central Park; title: The Salinger triptych; title: 1934-1936: Salinger the sublime; title: The perversities of Princeton; title: Samizdat Salinger; title: 1937: Vienna; title: "A girl I knew"; title: The bacon king; title: The eighth-grade canon; title: The muse of Manasquan; title: 1938: "The young man went back to college"; title: The New Yorker; title: Roger Angell; title: The professional; title: Room 505; title: "The daring young man on the flying trapeze"; title: 1133 Park Avenue; title: 1941: "A young girl in 1941 with no waist at all"; title: Women in letters; title: The fan; title: The lady upstairs; title: Joyce Maynard; title: 1945: The end of the War; title: 1945: The Nazi bride; title: 1961: The year of the woodchuck; title: 1972: "Begin the Beguine"; title: The miscalculation; title: Gustave Lobrano and William Shawn; title: 1960s-1980s: Letters to the Swami; title: The Catcher in the Rye: rereading and birthing.