Salinger biography slawinski communist
In the English-speaking world Polish fiction has never been granted the same recognition as the Russian novel..
Biography, of M. Bandelio, of E. Barlach, of C. Bene, of W Communist, image of, in Soviet Ukrainian prose, Comparative lit.
‘J.D. Salinger: A Life’: Kenneth Slawenski’s biography of a reluctant genius
‘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 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.
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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