Friday, January 3, 2014

The Salinger Biography: David Shields, Shane Salerno; c. 2014

An excellent biography.

The authors conclude with the "conditions" that shaped his life.
  • His anatomy: one testicle.
  • The love of his life, whom he lost: Oona O'Neill (daughter of Eugene O'Neill; Oona married Charlie Chaplin)
  • War: it is hard to say what would have affected him most -- losing Oona or what he saw/endured in WWII (Utah Beach on D-Day; Hurtgen Forest, Battle of the Bulge; first to liberate concentration camps)
I think that everything that follows, follows from the first three, and I'm not so sure about #1.
  • Religion: Vedanta
  • Cornish: reclusive home in New Hampshire
  • Wives: three (?)
  • Children: two -- Margaret and Matthew
  • Girls: creepy
  • Seclusion: not particularly unusual for authors; an art form
  • Detachment: he destroyed himself, and many others along the way
Quick notes
  • Born in 1919
  • Catholic/Jewish
  • Oona O'Neill
  • On D-Day: about 25 years old; carried his typewriter everywhere he went
  • Off to war; loses Oona to Charlie Chaplin
  • Always wanted to be a writer; had the first six chapters of Catcher in the Rye when he landed on Utah
  • Met Hemingway three times during the war; first time during the liberation of Paris
  • Realizes he is having a nervous breakdown prior to discharge from army
  • Two weeks in civilian mental health hospital, Nuremberg
  • Honorable discharge; de-nazification of Germany
  • Marries Sylvia, German, physician, probably Gestapo/Nazi,
  • Divorced
  • The origin of Esme; child-love Jean Miller, Florida
  • Child love: Shirley Blaney
  • The New Yorker, editor William Shawn, 1952 - 1987; "father figure"?
  • Wife Claire Douglas; two children; divorced
  • Joyce Maynard
  • Colleen O'Neill, third wife, nursing student when married; 40 years his junior, married in early 1980s
  • Two literary families: Glass and Holden
  • Last short story published: Hapworth -- considered awful
  • After Hapworth, The New Yorker never published anything by Salinger again
  • Died 2010

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