Salinger the Mystery Man

There’s no one quite like J.D. Salinger – a writer whose reputation rests primarily upon one dazzling novel, a stylist who resisted the Hemingway mantra, and a recluse who prefers to remain faceless behind his work so that those who seek to learn about him, hoping by doing so to enjoy his work more, are frustrated at every turn. Who is the real Salinger? What motivated him to create the strange world of Holden Caulfield? How did he approach his work and what did he think of himself and his oeuvre? More to the point, is there anything we can learn from Salinger’s life, which has now been analyzed in no less than four biographies – one by his own daughter, another by a former lover – is there anything we can glean from the story of his life, thus far, which would shed additional light upon his fiction and help us appreciate it more?