“... himself a connoisseur of the pitfalls of biography since the frustrations of his search for J.D. Salinger. In Keepers of the Flame (1992) he surveyed the legal and practical impediments: the prophylactic bonfire, the deathbed prohibition, the vigilant widow, the lies artfully sown in life to spring up as pious myths after death, the outrageously ...”

“... dispel the unease: it rather increases it. When writers complain about biography, when – as J.D. Salinger did with Ian Hamilton – they take every legal step to prevent themselves being written about, when they destroy their own manuscripts, ask for their letters to be returned or better still burnt, it’s usually concluded that they have ‘something to ...”

“... it that tang.’ The effect of such passages is eerily like Gravity’s Rainbow rewritten by J.D. Salinger, and Pynchon and Salinger both haunt Moonglow. The strange prominence in a novel of pretended self-revelation of the two postwar writers who most insisted on keeping their lives private doesn’t seem to be making any ...”

“... claim on the early Spider-Man as Kirby had on the bulk of the Marvel characters, but ‘the J.D. Salinger of comics’ has been no obstacle to Stan Lee’s attention-hogging claims of authorship in the thirty-five years since Ditko quit Marvel in a silent, Objectivist huff. So the icon sank into our brains. As with the Beatles, bonding could occur in ...”

“... call cosmic extremes. He went silent, became absent, allegedly working but never seen, the J.D. Salinger of the US space programme. The race for the Moon was fuelled by a terrifying combustion of scientific know-how and political paranoia. But the rocket engineers’ sense of how to articulate awe, how to inhabit teatime-news psychology, how to manipulate ...”

“... Thus, as often happens with US fiction (remember the rumours that Thomas Pynchon was really J.D. Salinger under another name?), attention is deflected away from the substantive matter of the novel, and onto various gee-whizz discussions of supposedly Post-Modernist authorial behaviour – the adult version of the Phew-It-Was-Only-A-Dream-Or-Was-It metaphysic ...”

“... to preserve their secrets. They will fight impertinent biographers through the courts (like J.D. Salinger). They will (like T.S. Eliot or Jack London) set up vigilant estates to stand like pyramids over the author’s reputation and defy any tomb-robbing researcher. They will themselves incinerate mountains of correspondence (as did Dickens) or enjoin ...”

“... parents and killed them off in various fictional displacements. Mark Twain did it too. So did J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth. Popular American fiction is full of adolescent crises: of good-bad boys running away from home, escaping one form of captivity only to wind up in another as suitable cases for treatment. It is not only in Hemingway’s war fiction that ...”

“... musical issue. I also want to know how writers like Racine, Heine, Lorca and even J.D. Salinger could have renounced linguistic virtuosity. After writing Phèdre, the last of the secular plays, Racine renounced the alexandrine in order to become Louis XIV’s historiographer. Heine gave up writing lyric poetry in order to write journalism. Lorca ...”

“... what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that all such confessions are deceptive. To quote J.D. Salinger (lines I’ve already included in more than one publication): A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride. The thing to listen for, every time, with a ...”

“... do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?’: you can talk in koans – but so did J.D. Salinger, and look where he ended up. As a general rule, a book reviewer presented with a character declared to be brilliant but not shown to be, a character who loves everything and everyone without limit, a character who is in turn loved by everyone he ...”

“... about one-book authors, a cautionary roster of the silent that included Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison. Heller’s history reflected theirs – the dreams of youth and years of literary apprenticeship, a period of obsessed scribbling, enthusiasm from a publisher, a ripple of applause from the fraternity of reviewers, followed ...”

“... was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with equipment he’d made out of ...”

“... Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t fail to register the impact ...”

“... into 2021: in a Pierre Cardin obituary; in a Gerry Marsden obituary; in a documentary about J.D. Salinger; in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles-at-home photo from 1963; a ‘previously ...”