The
New York Times Art Beat blog reports that
a biography of the reclusive J.D. Salinger, who died in 2010, will be published by Simon &
Schuster in September. Entitled The Private War of
J.D. Salinger, it has been eight years in the making and is based on interviews with 150 people who worked with, knew, or were
influenced by Salinger. One of the co-authors,
Shane Salerno, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie Savages,
said of Salinger: “The myth that people have read about and
believed for 60 years about J.D. Salinger is one of someone too pure
to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of
Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human
being. Our book offers a complete re-evaluation and reinterpretation of
the work and the life.”
It's interesting to note that two
previous works published during Salinger's lifetime also purported to be an
intimate portrait of Salinger. In 1999 his
ex-lover Joyce Maynard, after selling Salinger's private letters at
auction, published At Home in the World: A Memoir,
chronicling her relationship with Salinger, who was 35 years older. This was followed in 2000 by the publication of the controversial and
largely unflattering portrait of Salinger in Dreamcatcher:
A Memoir, written by his
daughter Margaret.
The
publisher of the forthcoming biography is billing it as an
opportunity for Salinger's readers to know the author better. Those
who grew up reading Salinger's exquisite short stories and his
coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye
may wish to give it a pass, however, and continue to let the
writer's works speak for themselves.
For the original article, see
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/biography-of-j-d-salinger-coming-in-september/#postComment.
This will be amazing to read.
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