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    J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist
    J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist
    J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist
    Audiobook5 hours

    J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist

    Written by Thomas Beller

    Narrated by Grover Gardner

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 Salinger’s 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 Salinger’s 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 Salinger’s 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 3, 2014
    ISBN9781480584822
    J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist
    Author

    Thomas Beller

    Thomas Beller is the author of Seduction Theory, a collection of stories; The Sleep-Over Artist, a novel; and How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, an essay collection. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker‘s Culture Desk, has edited numerous anthologies including two drawn from his website, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and was a cofounder of the literary journal Open City.

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    Reviews for J.D. Salinger

    3.5/5

    18 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I picked up this book after watching "Rebel in the Rye" hoping it might flesh out some of the vagaries. But they're still vague, his experiences in World War 2, his relationships with children and the raison d'etre of Catcher in the Rye. Still adds colour to Salinger rich body of work.
    • 3/5
      This is as much about the author's story of trying to research J.D. Salinger as it is a biography of Salinger.I learned a lot more about how the author and others felt about Salinger than Salinger himself.
    • 4/5
      An interesting read, but I've noticed that my last two biographies (this and Harvey Butchart) have involved the doings of the biographer as much as the biographee. What is up with this? Sure hope this is not a trend as, in this case, I don't much care about Thomas Beller. A bit more detail regarding marriages and kid would have been welcome as well.