Salinger biography slawinski david

‘J.D. Salinger: A Life’

by Kenneth Slawenski

Random House, 450 pp., $27

Sixty years ago this month, the writer J.D.

Salinger received a letter from The New Yorker magazine weighing in on a manuscript to a novel he’d sent them.

Salinger biography slawinski david bowie

Salinger breathlessly opened it, expecting an excerpt from his decade-in-the-making novel to be embraced, particularly since he’d completed it due to the editor’s constant urging.

The verdict on the book, which Salinger planned to call “The Catcher in the Rye,” was that The New Yorker thought it stunk.

“The notion that in one family (the Caulfield family) there are four such extraordinary children … is not quite tenable,” wrote the rejecting editor.

The rest, of course, is history, and this being Salinger, much of that history is ironic.

“Catcher” went o