J D Salinger

The J.D. Salinger documentary that has fascinated the literary and media worlds will now have its day before an audience. Shane Salerno's “Salinger,” about the reclusive “Catcher in the Rye” author who died in 2010, will be released in theaters on Sept. 6, The Weinstein Co. said Thursday. That positions it for a run at late-summer film festivals that mark the beginning of awards season as well as during the season that follows. Salerno, most recently a writer and executive producer on Oliver Stone's drug-trade thriller “Savages,” has also turned the material into a book, while the movie will also air as part of PBS' venerated “American Masters" series.

A real case of deja vu Re "Conservatives criticize activist after his arrest," Jan. 28 I find it troubling that three of the four Republican activists arrested for illegally entering the office of a U.S. senator in New Orleans ran conservative newspapers at their respective colleges. None of these young men was a lone wolf with a grudge. None was an anonymous Average Joe plotting a crime. These presumably were the cream of the young Republicans, the best their party has to offer for the future.

After "The Catcher in the Rye" exploded onto the literary scene in 1951, author J.D. Salinger had what every writer yearns for -- money, fame and critical acclaim. "Catcher" became a touchstone for the teenage culture just emerging in post-World War II America, and has remained one for every generation of youths since. But instead of basking in celebrity, Salinger walked away and slammed the door. After one brilliant novel, a novella and a couple of dozen short stories, he turned his back on the cult hunger for his writing and after 1965 refused to publish further.

This biography became something of a cause celebre in 1986, when Salinger emerged from two decades of seclusion and attempted to block its publication. After a series law suits, Hamilton rewrote the text, shifting the focus to his labors as the biographer of an unwilling subject. The result is an arch solipsism that attempts to cash in on the continuing popularity of "The Catcher in the Rye."

Ian Hamilton, the respected British critic, editor, poet and biographer whose unauthorized book on J.D. Salinger was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court because it quoted from the novelist's unpublished letters without his permission, has died. He was 63. Hamilton died Thursday in London of undisclosed causes, a former employer announced.

J.D. Salinger, the fiercely private author of "The Catcher in the Rye," has been exposed again--this time by his own daughter, who says in a new memoir that he drank his own urine, spoke in tongues and rarely had sex with her mother. Margaret A. Salinger's "Dream Catcher: A Memoir" also reports that her half-Jewish father was once married to a Nazi Party functionary. The book, due out Wednesday from Pocket Books, comes two years after Joyce Maynard's expose of her romance with Salinger when she was a teenager and he was in his 50s. Salinger, 81, has not published anything new since 1965 and has remained publicly silent for years, refusing all interview requests.

Re "He may be 90, but don't mess with J.D." Opinion, June 25 Meghan Daum takes cheap shots at J.D. Salinger, calling him "paranoid, mercurial and even delusional," and giving short shrift to his attempts to suppress unauthorized use of his characters in a new Swedish novel. Given her research on the subject, Daum should know that any publication regarding Salinger or his landmark novel, "Catcher in the Rye," stirs considerable interest, with or without his intervention. So, he is not delusional.

Moody, mannered and supremely irritating, Christophe Honoré's "Dans Paris" plays like a pastiche of French cinema clichés through the ages. Perhaps not surprisingly, if nonsensically, the movie quotes Salinger at every opportunity in telling the story of a pair of handsome young brothers experiencing love and loss in Paris. Well, at least we'll always have it.

J.D. Salinger, as you may have read over the last few weeks, is inveighing against "phonies" yet again. Fifty-eight years since the publication of "The Catcher in the Rye" -- indeed, 44 years since he published anything -- the famously reclusive and litigious author, now 90, recovering from hip surgery and totally deaf, has taken legal action to stop the U.S. publication of a Swedish novel called "Sixty Years Later: Coming Through Rye."