Synopses & Reviews
J.D. Salinger published his first story in
The New Yorker at age twenty-nine. Three years later came
The Catcher in The Rye, a novel that has sold more than sixty-five million copies and achieved mythic status since its publication in 1951. Subsequent books introduced a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, hyperarticulate Glass family, whose stage is the Upper East Side. Yet we still know little about Salingers personal life and less about his character.
This was by design. In 1953, determined to escape media attention, Salinger fled to New Hampshire, where he would live until his death in 2010. Even there, privacy proved elusive: a Time cover story; a memoir by Joyce Maynard (who dropped out of Yale as a freshman to move in with him); and a legal battle over an unauthorized biography, which darkened his last decades. Yet he continued to write, and is rumored to have left behind a mass of work that his estate intends to publish.
Thomas Beller, a novelist who grew up in Manhattan, is the ideal guide to Salingers world. He gives us a sense of life at The New Yorker (where he was once a staff writer) and a portrait of editor Gus Lobrano, whose relationship with Salinger has rarely been written about. He visits Salingers summer camp and the apartment buildings where the author lived. He reads the famous works with obsessive attention, finding in them an image of his own life experience. The result is a quest biography about learning to know yourself in order to know your subject. J.D. Salinger is the triumph of a rare literary form: biography as work of art.
Synopsis
A spirited, deeply personal inquiry into the near-mythic life and canonical work of J. D. Salinger by a writer known for his sensitivity to the Manhattan culture that was Salinger's great theme.
Synopsis
A spirited, deeply personal inquiry into the near-mythic life and canonical work of J. D. Salinger by a writer known for his sensitivity to the Manhattan culture that was Salinger's great theme.
Three years after his death at ninety-one, J.D. Salinger remains our most mythic writer. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) became an American classic, and he was for a long time the writer for The New Yorker. Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters introduced, by way of the Glass family, a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, voluble cast of characters whose stage is the Upper East Side of New York. But fame proved a burden, and in 1953 Salinger fled to New Hampshire, spending the next half century in isolation.
Beller has followed his subjects trail, from his Park Avenue childhood to his final refuge, barnstorming across New England to visit various Salinger shrines, interviewing just about everyone alive who ever knew Salinger. The result is a quest biography in the tradition of Geoff Dyers Out of Sheer Rage, a book as much about the biographer as about the subject—two vivid, entertaining stories in one.
Synopsis
A cinematic and biographical assessment of the twentieth century's greatest filmmaker, by one of our most versatile critics.
Synopsis
Part of James Atlas’ Icons series, a filmic and biographical assessment of the twentieth century’s greatest filmmaker, by one of our most versatile critics. Alfred Hitchcock presides over the history of film with a magisterial authority expressed in the silhouette that has made him recognizable around the world. No director has produced a more familiar body of work. From North by Northwest to Rear Window, The Birds to Psycho, his films are classics of the genre. In 2012, Vertigo was named the greatest film of all time by the British Film Institute.
Michael Wood, one of our most versatile critics, has given us a compact study of Hitchcock that deftly melds biography and criticism. He gives us the life, from a provincial suburb of London to the most posh precincts of Los Angeles, and a fabled career that began as a designer of title cards in the silent film era. He reads the films as visual texts, studying their plots to tease out their sometimes elusive meaning. And he reminds us that what we see is a Hitchcock film isn’t always what we think we see, that menace and murder lurk just beneath the surface. Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much is a virtuoso performance by a critic who knows everything.
About the Author
MICHAEL WOOD is one of our most versatile critics, conversant with both modern literature and film. A graduate of Cambridge University, he spent most of his career at Princeton, where he is a professor emeritus of comparative literature. Among his many works are The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, Children of Science: On Contemporary Fiction, and America in the Movies, a survey of Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s.
Table of Contents
1. 1923: On Running Away 1
2. The Gift 3
3. Lost 11
4. 1930s: Ham and Cheese 14
5. The Myron Arms 18
6. Comanches 21
7. 1932: McBurney and Central Park 26
8. The Salinger Triptych 29
9. 1934-1936: Salinger the Sublime 33
10. The Perversities of Princeton 39
11. Samizdat Salinger 43
12. 1937: Vienna 47
13. “A Girl I Knew” 52
14. The Bacon King 55
15. The Eighth Grade Canon 57
16. The Muse of Manasquan 60
17. 1938: “The Young Man Went Back to College.” 63
18. The New Yorker 69
19. Roger Angell 76
20. The Professional 82
21. Room 505 86
22. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” 94
23. 1133 Park Avenue 97
24. 1941: “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All” 104
25. Women in Letters 110
26. The Fan 117
27. The Lady Upstairs 120
28. Joyce Maynard 126
29. 1945: The End of the War 131
30. 1945: The Nazi Bride 136
31. 1961: The Year of the Woodchuck 142
32. 1972: “Begin the Beguine” 154
33. The Miscalculation 157
34. Gustave Lobrano and William Shawn 160
35. 1960s-1980s: Letters to the Swami 172
36. The Catcher in the Rye: Rereading and Birthing 177
Acknowledgments 181