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Feb 02, 2018
* Winner of the 2012 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award Kenneth Slawenski’s [Salinger: A Life] is the most balanced, the least sensationalist, the most satisfying, and the most useful account of the life and the career of J.D. Salinger that is currently available in print. Many literary biographies on Salinger that I have read have tended to be sensationalist, antagonistic, spiteful, gossipy, disrespectful, and devoid of any information on how he became a successful writer. Such works, marketed to capitalize on the general public’s fascination with a reclusive celebrity, talk a good game about pulling back the veil to reveal some hidden monstrosity but in the end leave its readers hanging. One such biography stated that the authors of the book, having failed to contact Salinger directly for an interview, went to the village’s post office where they absconded with Salinger’s mail, opened his letters, and revealed their contents. Indeed, such works reveal more about their respective authors than the subject. Nevertheless, Kenneth Slawenski, who is also the founder of a website on Salinger named DeadCaulfields.com, has in this book accomplished what many have failed to do: shape years of research into a reasonably objective but also interesting and useful text about Salinger and his writings without violating the privacy of anyone. For example: of three book-length biographies that I have read on J.D. Salinger, only Slawenski wrote of the instrumental advocacy and the painstaking editing by William Shawn, The New Yorker editor and the man Salinger credited with his stardom. Only Slawenski chronicled how The New Yorker’s then staid, tired, and reactionary fiction department received this new and riotously popular writer, from resistance to revolt to coup d’état. That The New Yorker fought tooth and nail against publishing, undoubtedly, the one writer they are now most famously associated with spoke more to me about Salinger's place in time and in culture than unverified reports on Salinger’s dietary habits in Cornish, New Hampshire. Of course, even with Slawenski’s research, many questions and uncertainties remain unanswered with regards to Mr. Salinger. Questions and riddles that posterity will surely answer, either by Slawenski or another biographer or perhaps by Salinger’s own hand (via some hidden autobiography) or even by Holden Caulfield, even if he doesn’t “feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth” (The Catcher in the Rye, pg.1).