Like many people I first read J.D. Salinger‘s novel The Catcher in the Rye as an adolescent and was immediately smitten with Holden Caufield and the spirit of the book. Yet it wasn’t until I was older, and a much more experienced reader, that I read Franny and Zooey and his collection of short stories titled Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a personal favorite) that I became a true devotee of Salinger.
The stories in Nine Stories may be as perfectly crafted as any American short stories since those in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time or, more recently, the stories of Raymond Carver. Salinger was in complete control of his craft and could seemingly do whatever he wanted on the page…And then, of course, he famously disappeared from the public scene and stopped publishing entirely.
A new documentary due out this September titled “Finding Salinger,” documents one man’s search for Salinger during the last years’s of his life. Here is the trailer: