About Salinger

Weekend Edition Sunday's Wade Goodwin interviews Shane Salerno, the coauthor of the upcoming biography of J.D. Salinger, titled Salinger, and the director of the documentary of the same name:

"J.D. Salinger spent 10 years writing The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his life regretting it."
That's the opening line of a major new book about one of America's best known and most revered writers. J.D. Salinger died three years ago at the age of 91, after publishing four slim books. But one of those books has sold more than 65 million copies and has become a touchstone for young people coming of age around the world.
Catcher in the Rye still sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.
Shane Salerno is co-author of the monumental 600-page book, called, simply, Salinger. He's also the director of a related documentary, also called Salinger, to be released Friday, September 6.

A bit about Salinger's experience in WWII:

"One of the first details I learned was that he was carrying six chapters of Catcher in the Rye when he landed on D-Day. That was something that stunned me. He carried these chapters with him almost as a talisman to keep him alive, and he worked on the book throughout the war.
"His first day of combat was D-Day, and from there he proceeded into the hedgerows and the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, and then ultimately entering the concentration camp, a sub-camp of Dachau."
"If J.D. Salinger had not participated in World War II, we would not be having this conversation. The fact is that the work that is known prior to combat is not on the level that the rest of the work. All of the work for which we know J.D. Salinger — Bananafish, Esme, Catcher, Nine Stories — all written after the war.
"Before he had landed on D-Day, J.D. Salinger was a Park Avenue rich kid. Nothing prepared him for what World War II was going to do to him psychologically. We know this because at the end of the war, he checked into a mental institution, and then did something truly remarkable, which is, came out of the mental institution and signed back up for more, and participated in the de-Nazification of Germany."

 A little more of Salinger's reaction to the success of A Catcher in the Rye:

"He was completely overwhelmed by fame, and what he did, very much like Holden, very much like Catcher in the Rye, was beat a fast exit out of New York City. He moved to Cornish, N.H., and he never looked back.
"J.D. Salinger was not a recluse; he was very private, and he wanted a private life. He was a man of deep, deep contradictions. He was a man who would write about renouncing the world, and then write a letter to a friend about how much he liked the Whopper at Burger King."

I love the part about writing a letter to a friend about how much he loved a Whopper.