Stephen B. Shepard is the author of the new biography Salinger's Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey. Shepard's other books include A Literary Journey to Jewish Identity. He is the founding dean emeritus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and he worked at Newsweek, Saturday Review, and Business Week.
Q: What inspired you to write this biography of author J.D.Salinger (1919-2010)?
A: In 2018, I wrote a book about the Jewish-American writers –- Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Arthur Miller, and all the others who made up a golden age of Jewish writers in post-war America. I thought of including Jerome David Salinger, better known to the world as J.D. Salinger, but his Jewishness was rather complicated. So I left him out.
Yet Salinger continued to fascinate me. When Covid sidelined all of us in March 2020, I started reading more about Salinger’s life, as well as all the commentary about his fiction. I soon realized that there was more to say, and that I could turn it into a book. Thus was born Salinger’s Soul.
Q: How was title chosen and what does it signify for you?
A: Salinger’s Soul conveys his inner life, rather than focusing on his work. I didn’t want to reiterate the many good literary biographies published over the years.
Because he lived mostly in seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire, for 57 years, little was known about how he lived, especially the role religion played in his daily life and in his later fiction.
And apart from his fling with Joyce Maynard, little was known about his relationships with other young women, those “in the last minute of their girlhood,” as one of his fictional characters put it. Thus, the subtitle: “His Personal & Religious Odyssey.”
Q: How did you research Salinger's life and what surprised or intrigued you?
A: First, I reread all his published work, not hard because he published little and nothing at all after 1965. There was the one extraordinary novel that made him famous: The Catcher in the Rye. Plus some 35 published short stories.
I read them all to trace his changes as a writer and what it might tell us about how his life evolved. Then I read many of the reviews and commentary about his work, including scholars works and some Ph.D. dissertations.
What I learned was the extraordinary role that religion played in his daily life. Born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother who “passed” as Jewish, young Jerry Salinger was raised Jewish and had a bar mitzvah at age 13.
Once he found out his mother wasn’t the Jew she pretended to be, he abandoned Judaism completely. There is nothing Jewish in his later life and almost nothing in his fiction.
He ultimately embraced a mystical form of Hinduism called Vedanta, which dominated his personal life and his later fiction. Unlike such contemporaries as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Salinger was never known as a “Jewish writer,” but he certainly became a religious writer.
I confess to not knowing anything about Vedanta, but I learned an enormous amount about it. Salinger’s Soul deals extensively with his practice of Vedanta. It is fascinating and not widely known.
Q: What are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about J.D. Salinger?
A: Most people know two things about J.D. Salinger: that he wrote Catcher and that he soon secluded himself in rural New Hampshire for the rest of his life – becoming famous for not wanting to be famous.
They don’t generally recognize that he often came out of hiding – sometimes to visit The New Yorker, which published many of his short stories, often taking lunch at the Algonquin hotel with editor William Shawn.
He also visited the Vedanta center and the Gotham Book Mart in New York, met with his buddies from World War II, and pursued young women. He wasn’t the complete recluse generally thought.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Trying to get Salinger’s Soul to as many readers as possible. Not sure what comes next.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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