Salinger

JD Salinger wrote for ten years and then became bitter in Rye until his death. Prior to the publication of the book, he was a World War II veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; after the war he sought nothing but the cure for his wounded psyche. The huge success of the novel about the high school guy gave birth to a myth: Salinger, like Holden’s sensitive mimosa, is too good for this world. After that, throughout his life, he unsuccessfully reconciled himself to two sharply opposite versions: myth and reality. In Rye, more than 65 million copies of the pliers have been sold, and more than half a million are still sold each year; a defining work for generations, a lasting American adolescent totem. The cultural weight and impact of the four short books in Salinger’s slender oeuvre is almost unparalleled in modern literature. It has been a half-century-long game for critics and the public to read in man through his work, for man could not be spoken of. Salinger's epic alter ego hit, obsessively guarded privacy, and his vast collection of stubbornly unpublished writings became an inaccessible legend. Salinger was an extremely complex, deeply controversial personality. It is in vain that we have spent the last fifty-five years of our lives in retreat; he made great journeys, his many relationships, his friendship for life woven, he devoured mass culture, he exemplified in many respects all that he criticized in his writings. No matter how much he was a hermit, he had a constant dialogue with the world to strengthen his reputation as a hermit. He really wanted privacy, but over time, listening to a hermit writer became the same trademark of his person as the pliers in Rye. Much has been analyzed about how difficult it may have been for Salinger to live and work in the shadow of a myth that is a shame to deny; we show how he himself excited this myth with great experience. We set ourselves three goals: to find out why Salinger stopped publishing; why it has become a fog; and what he worked until his death was forty-five years. In nine years, we conducted interviews with more than two hundred people on five continents, many of whom were not available for statement until then, but our request was all readily granted. We intend to show Salinger in a variety of ways, his lifelong World War II countermeasures, lovers, friends, caregivers, fellow students, as well as his editorial, publishing, New Yorker colleagues, fans, enthusiasts, and many other significant personalities with his personal testimony about how it affected their lives, their work, and culture in general. The material we have just published for the first time in more than a hundred photographs, minutes, diaries, letters, memoirs, court records, testimonies, excerpts from military documents recently released from secrecy can hopefully provide many factual clarifications and significant discoveries. We highlight the last fifty-five years of his life, an era that has remained largely obscure for Salinger’s former biographers.