First published 2013
David Shields spent eight years pursuing the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. Previous biographers had failed to penetrate Salinger's carefully constructed privacy, recycling the same incomplete stories for decades. Shields took a different approach. He conducted exclusive interviews with over 200 people across five continents, many speaking publicly about Salinger for the first time. The book reveals previously unknown relationships, secret documents, and unpublished photographs that illuminate the fifty-six years after Salinger retreated from public life. Through firsthand accounts from war buddies, family members, lovers, editors, and New Yorker colleagues, Shields constructs an oral biography that exposes the contradictory man behind the myth. The research coincided with Salinger's death in 2010, when sources became more willing to share their stories. Shields offers readers unprecedented access to the private world of literature's most famous hermit.
Genres: biography, literary-criticism, literary-fiction, 20th-century, american, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: biography, oral-history
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
700 pages · Hardcover · Simon & Schuster