In Search of J.D. Salinger - Softcover

Hamilton, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747536406 ISBN 13: 9780747536406

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1998

Synopsis

In trying to research the details of J.D. Salinger's life for this book, Ian Hamilton forced the writer out of his reclusive hideaway to challenge his discoveries in an American court of law. When Ian Hamilton set out in 1983 to write a biography of Salinger, he knew that there would be difficulties. Just how great those difficulties would be, what implacable hostility he would meet from Salinger and what astonishing finds he would stumble on, he could not have guessed.;This text is the story of that quest, a literary detective story which ends in court, with a bitter and protracted lawsuit in which Salinger sought to restrict the use Hamilton could make of his letters.

About this title

Review:

Ian Hamilton sets himself a tough challenge by attempting a biography of a writer best known for his hermitic nature and for not having published anything in the last 30 years. Hamilton romps briskly through Salinger's life employing an annoying device throughout by which he records the debates between himself and his "biographer alter ego". This half- hearted attempt to problematise the nature of biography is, seemingly, to excuse the gaps in the text. It does not work well. At the end of In Search of JD Salinger we learn more about the lawsuit provoked by Hamilton's first attempt at this book. This, the edited version, is not the book nor, in a sense, the life that Hamilton wanted to produce. It is a poor substitute for what might have been. A life of Salinger has its interest, of course, but when that life has deliberately eschewed publicity in the interest of the art that such asceticism may create should we not focus on the work created? The literary criticism, when it comes, is clumsy and does not make up for either the paucity of facts or the lack of insight or real investigation into Salinger's silence. Hamilton's first book was to be entitled J D Salinger: A Writing Life-- he should have focused on that writing a little more closely. --Mark Thwaite

About the Author:

Ian Hamilton was born in 1938, in King's Lynn, Norfolk, and educated at Darlington Grammar School and Keble College, Oxford. In 1962, he founded the influential poetry magazine, the Review, and he was later editor of the New Review. He also wrote biographies and journalism, mainly about literature and football. He died in 2001.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0747536406
• ISBN 13: 9780747536406
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228