J. D. Salinger: A Life [Hardcover]

Kenneth Slawenski (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 25, 2011

One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, author of the classic Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in The Times of London calls “energetic and magnificently researched”—a book from which “a true picture of Salinger emerges.” Filled with new information and revelations—garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records—J. D. Salinger presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century.

Kenneth Slawenski explores Salinger’s privileged youth, long obscured by misrepresentation and rumor, revealing the brilliant, sarcastic, vulnerable son of a disapproving father and doting mother and his entrance into a social world where Gloria Vanderbilt dismissively referred to him as “a Jewish boy from New York.” Here too are accounts of Salinger’s first broken heart—Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona, left him for the much older Charlie Chaplin—and the devastating World War II service (“a living hell”) of which he never spoke and which haunted him forever.

J. D. Salinger features all the dazzle of this author’s early writing successes, his dramatic encounters with luminaries from Ernest Hemingway to Laurence Olivier to Elia Kazan, his surprising office intrigues with famous New Yorker editors and writers, and the stunning triumph of The Catcher in the Rye, which would both make him world-famous and hasten his retreat into the hills of New Hampshire.

Whether it’s revealing the facts of his hasty, short-lived first marriage or his lifelong commitment to Eastern religion, which would dictate his attitudes toward sex, nutrition, solitude, and creativity, J. D. Salinger is this unique author’s unforgettable story in full—one that no lover of literature can afford to miss.
 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2011: In the year since his death, we've heard much more about J.D. Salinger's reclusiveness and eccentricities, both real and exaggerated, than we have about the writing that made him famous in the first place. Kenneth Slawenski's Salinger: A Life avoids such scandalmongering in order to deliver a sensitive (but not fawning) portrait of Salinger the writer. Slawenski looks not only at Salinger's most famous works, but also finds a wealth of psychological insights in places like rejection letters and biographical statements. Not surprisingly, Salinger's life, and especially his service in World War II, provided much of the raw material for his stories. But Slawenski does much more than compare Salinger's biography to his literary output: he also shows how compromises, conflicts, and editorial intrigues shaped Salinger's works, even when he was at the peak of his career. The book has much less to say about Salinger's post-1960 retirement and self-seclusion, apart from the author's occasional foray into the public eye by way of a rare interview or court case. But Slawenski does this for good reason: Salinger: A Life seeks only to explain Salinger as most of us knew him, through his writing. As a result, both die-hard fans and those who last picked up Catcher in the Rye in high school will find it enlightening. --Darryl Campbell

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A Look Inside J.D. Salinger: A Life

© PS 166 Until he was thirteen, Sonny attended public school on the Upper West Side. This is a class photo of Salinger and his schoolmates on the steps of P.S. 166, circa 1929.	© Valley Forge Military Academy Cadet Corporal Salinger in 1936. Salinger’s yearbook photo from Valley Forge Military Academy. Salinger used his own boarding school as the inspiration for Holden Caulfield’s Pency Prep when writing The Catcher in the Rye. Unlike Holden, Salinger excelled at Valley Forge.
© Dorothy Nollman/Peter Imbres Jerry in 1939. A photo taken by his friend Dorothy Nollman while on break from Columbia University. Within a year, Salinger’s first short story would be published and his career launched.	Between boot camp and combat. Air Corps photo taken in 1943 while Salinger was assigned to the Public Relations Department of the Air Service Command. A year later he would be fighting in Europe.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. After nearly a decade™s research and Slawenski™s obvious empathy with his reclusive subject™s search for emotional and philosophical equilibrium, this exemplary biography will be released on the first anniversary of J.D. Salinger™s death. It™s a highly informative effort to assess the arc of Salinger™s career, the themes of his fiction, and his influence on 20th-century American literature. Born in 1919, indulged by his mother while growing up on Park Avenue, Salinger was a bored and indifferent student. He eventually found a mentor in legendary Columbia professor Whit Burnett, who encouraged him to work on the pieces that became The Catcher in the Rye even while Salinger was serving in WWII Europe. Slawenski emphasizes that Salinger™s wartime experience, from D-Day to the liberation of Dachau, œwas the traumatic turning point in his life, influencing the sense of futility that permeates his early work. Salinger™s salvation, Slawenski demonstrates, came through his acceptance of Vedatic Buddhism, and he argues persuasively that Salinger came to consider writing an aspect of meditation, a task that demanded solitude and perfect control over the presentation of his fiction. The celebrity surrounding the publication of Catcher in the Rye in 1951 activated the split between his striving for asceticism and the demands of the outside world. Slawenski describes Salinger™s three marriages, records his contentious relationships with his publishers, his special relationship with the New Yorker, and Slawenski™s assiduous research allows him to identify and assess many obscure and unpublished stories. In total, an invaluable work that sheds fascinating light on the willfully elusive author. B&w photos. (Jan. 25)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1St Edition edition (January 25, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400069513
• ISBN-13: 978-1400069514
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #142,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kenneth Slawenski is the bestselling author of J.D. Salinger: A Life (Random House, 2011), winner of the 2012 Humanities Book Award and is the creator of DeadCaulfields.com, a Salinger website founded in 2004 and recommended by The New York Times. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, France's Revue Feuilleton, The Huffington Post and Salon.com and his work has been excerpted in The New York Times and The Times (UK). As of 2013, Kenneth's work has been translated into 15 languages and published in 20 countries.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

84 of 94 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating! January 2, 2011

By P. B. Sharp TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Kenneth Slawenski has almost absorbed JD Salinger by osmosis, the writer becoming part of his breathing out and breathing in. Slawenski's understanding of Salinger is basic, almost on the chromosome level as though he had incorporated Salinger into his genes so that the two of them- biographer and writer - are twin souls. However, Slawenski says in the introduction that when Salinger died in January 2010, he did not mourn, but gave him a salute. It took Slawenski seven years to write this biography and it can be said to be the horse's mouth as far as Jerome David Salinger is concerned.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the chapters on World War II. Salinger had enlisted and eventually became a sergeant and this young man from a posh address in New York City stormed the Normandy Beach on D - Day and then spent unspeakable days and nights slogging through mud, crouching in fox holes with the snow coming down on his head but actually taking time when he could to write even in a fox hole. He saw the liberation of Paris but went right back in the fox holes crawling step by step fox hole to fox hole toward Berlin and the Battle of the Bulge. He managed to sneak under darkness into Hemingway's camp as the author was on location as a war correspondent.

And all the while, once even when crouching under a table with his typewriter, trying to avoid mortar shells, Salinger wrote. The war forged his writing and his soul and he was never again the same debonair, rather heedless young man he once was. Slawenski says that Salinger was not writing out of patriotism or with approval of Allied commanders' policies. He was writing for and about the boy next to him and these boys died by the thousands. The war was a baptism in fire.

Salinger lived to be 91 years old, and Slawenski follows him closely throughout his long life, through his three marriages, through his fencing with magazine editors, through the publication of "The Catcher in the Rye", through his withdrawal from public life as he became reclusive and absorbed in Zen Buddhism. And much, much more. This is a very turgid and comprehensive biography.

Catcher hung in the complaisant decade of the fifties rather like an underdone potato. The book was very radical for that era, full of obscenities and adolescent angst which not everybody appreciated or even understood. The book seems to polarize readers, with some loving it, some hating it and nobody effecting a lukewarm middle ground reaction.

But Salinger, in spite of the phenomenal success of Catcher felt the need for isolation far from any people or anything that was phony or pretentious. The farmhouse he bought in Cornish, New Hampshire, was primitive and isolated but not isolated enough. When he brought his second wife, Claire, to live there and he became the father of a baby girl, Margaret, he erected a concrete structure away from the farmhouse where he could write in total seclusion. He even refused an invitation from Jackie Kennedy to visit the White House, which made Clair furious.

Salinger's "Franny and Zooey" was finally published after years of wrangling with publishers and that book may be the writer's magnum opus, not Catcher. Slawenski writes excellent critiques of all of Salinger's works and this biography is particularly helpful in explaining difficult or obscure aspects of Salinger's stories.

"Salinger: A Life" is a page-turner, unusual in a biography. You will feel you got to know the reclusive writer quite well. Salinger would be horrified that his protective shields were torn away but the reader will be delighted to see Salinger naked, so to speak.Slawenski sums up his book thusly:

"By examining the life of JD Salinger, with all its sadness and imperfections...we are charged with the revaluation of our own lives, an assessment of our own connections and the weighing of our own integrity."

64 of 76 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Adoration, but no Joie January 15, 2011

By Zoeeagleeye VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Perhaps Kenneth Slawenski loved too much and this obscured his writer's faults from his notice. I didn't really need to have every story synopsized and explained to me. Too much of the book is taken up with that. I wanted more core Salinger, the man.

Slawenski's writing style is like a fond old uncle's remeniscences whose tone is a little flat and complacent. He skips here and there, then goes back to an earlier memory filled with cliche after cliche. It's not good: "filled with promise," "mantle of leadership," "called into question." How about, "As 1919 dawned people awoke to a fresh new world." You think? Or, "No place was more ready," For what? And this all within the first paragraph! By P. 7 I was lost in the geneology of the family, unable to get them straight due to scrambled writing.

What I disliked more, though, were the many unsupported conclusions and assumptions Slawenski draws. Some are more serious than others. Here's one that is almost a nonsequitur: "But business became his life, and by the time of his thirtieth birthday in 1917, his hair had gone completely 'iron grey.'" Cause and effect? Improbable.

Another example which shows us, I suppose, just how shallow the Salingers were: Slawenski writes that "In the 1920's religion and nationality became increasingly important." As a reaction to this, the Salingers raised their children "with a mixture of lukewarm religious and ethnic traditions." Lukewarm? Explain that, exactly.

There are also contradictions in the book. Slawenski quotes a friend of Salinger's making a negative comment. Then Slawenski chimes in with a positive one, defending Salinger. Doesn't work. His friends say Salinger was "condescending" and "pretentious," and most of his classmates didn't like him. Slawenski goes on to say Salinger was a person of "genuine warmth and veiled sarcasm." Oh? Nobody dislikes someone who is genuinely warm. Plus, a genuinely warm person does not deal in sarcasm -- they are mutually exclusive qualities. Perhaps Salinger was a person of genuine sarcasm and veiled warmth?

Salinger did well in the military and appeared to embrace it to the full. Yet Slawenski says that Salinger "would be loathed to admit it, (the military) perhaps helped him survive those years." Loathed to admit it? Hardly! These constant little assumptions and logical inaccuracies are confusing and irritating.

In short, this biography is full of stats and facts, but none of the aliveness it needs. Conclusions are drawn that don't mesh and those that should be drawn are left alone. For example, Salinger took up the cause against a New York law that, without "mercy" refused parole to those given life imprisonment sentences, saying in his superiorly scathing way that it denies "redemption." Out of this, Slawenski concludes that for Salinger, "salvation was the goal of life." What he fails to notice as Salinger refuses a small publishing favor to his old friend, teacher and mentor, and the man who first published him, Whit Burnett, is Salinger's own lack of mercy, his failure to offer any redemption or salvation to Burnett, not even favoring him with a personal reply after two entreaties. Very cold, indeed.

Some day someone is going to do the real detective legwork and find out more than just what Salinger wanted us to know. You won't find it in this book. BTW, I've read everything Salinger has ever written that I could find. I learned writing by studying his short stories. He is in the top three of my all-time favorite authors. If I expected more from Slawenski, pardon me.

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Pretty Good Book, If You Wanna Know the Truth January 3, 2011

By James Skrydlak VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Kenneth Slawenski, who has devoted himself to the study of J. D. Salinger's life and works for a decade or more has given us this volume, a combination of biography, opinion, and synopses of Salinger's works. Slawenski is an unabashed admirer of Salinger, as an author and as, it seems, a person. I applaud the fact that he takes this strong stand, although my opinion of Salinger as a person is not as positive as Slawenski's is.

This work is at its best when Slawenski is narrating Salinger's life; I found his treatment of Salinger's time in World War II, which is far more comprehensive than that in previous biographies, quite helpful in explaining the state of mind revealed in Salinger's works. I was less pleased with his summaries and explications of Salinger's works. Slawenski notes that Salinger believed that each reader's own experience with writing was paramount, yet he feels compelled to tell us what moments in many of the works mean. I do also feel that Slawenski lets his admiration for Salinger as a writer blind him to Salinger's flaws as a person. Many of the incidents in the book reveal him to have been a selfish and altogether unpleasant man at times. This is not news, but Slawenski continues to admire Salinger, never admitting that Salinger has behaved badly in any of the episodes.

My reservations in the previous paragraph notwithstanding, I consider this by far the best of the biographies of Salinger produced to date.