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“... sits beside what looks like a suitably unmade-up road somewhere in New England with the name ‘Salinger’ stencilled on its scored and rusty flank. For close on forty years now, this weathered receptacle has been asked to stand in for the man whose mailbox it is, who has himself passed definitively from view in a sustained fit of unsociability such that ...”

“... J.D. Salinger, who is now in his early eighties, has spent the greater part of his life hiding out from the world on a hilltop in New Hampshire. Over the last half century, he has continued to write steadily, it seems, but to protect his reclusion he has refused to publish any of his work since 1968. Then – at the last minute, as it were – a former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, a woman with whom Salinger had a nine-month relationship twenty-five years ago, decided to write a memoir of their affair – a memoir in which she details, among other things, his domestic, sexual and dietary quirks ...”

“... matches the shape and tint of present America.’ This was John Updike in 1961, saying of J.D. Salinger what critics since have been saying of John Updike: that here is a novelist uncannily responsive to the ‘personality’, if we can use the word, of his own culture. Updike, it has often been proclaimed, knows what it is like to be a ...”

“... version of the Robinson technique. Ian Hamilton, noted biographer of Robert Lowell, writes to J.D. Salinger and informs him that he has become Hamilton’s latest subject: would the notoriously reclusive novelist mind answering some questions, could he take a visit? Hamilton doesn’t expect an answer; nor does he want one, since he plans ‘a kind of Quest ...”

“... Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful memoir, In Search of J.D. Salinger. Keepers of the Flame is a further cogitation on ...”

“... When​ I think of J.D. Salinger now – not the books but the man – the thing I find hardest to understand is the moment when, in his early thirties, he began to hide his face. In 1952 he hired the photographer Antony Di Gesu to take a series of portraits. With his prominent nose, jaw and cheekbones he looks as ruggedly confident as a prizefighter – in early life he was a handsome man ...”

“... reviews: of Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex, The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, a book about the ‘Catholic sensibility’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Martin Amis’s Success, Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel, Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Truman Capote’s ...”

“... There are writers who do that. The first great refuser in contemporary literary culture was J.D. Salinger. The gigantic success he encountered turned the worldly figure who’d grown up on Park Avenue into a tormented recluse living behind a crocodile-infested moat in New Hampshire. (There were persistent rumours that ...”

“... what the author could be up to next, where he was, indeed who he was. Compared with Pynchon, J.D. Salinger is a publicity-hunter. One daring scholarly conjecture, that these authors are one and the same person, is a paranoid fantasy that might well have been induced by prolonged exposure to Pynchon’s oeuvre. For he explores, more intensively, maybe, than ...”

“... mellowing into crisp, brown-edged age. Novelists are notoriously sensitive about covers. J.D. Salinger won’t allow anything but type – the memory of one vilely inappropriate cover (a third-rate Saturday Evening Post illustration on For Esmé with Love and Squalor) gives a notion of why. The Penguin Franny and Zooey is black and white type on ...”

“... Michael Neve, ‘but divorces never do,’ which Neve said was as Wildean as it gets.It was J.D. Salinger, writing about William Shawn, who spoke of that rare thing, ‘born great artist-editors’, lovers of ‘the long shot’. I’ve admired a few editors, become their friends, holidayed with them and edited them back, fought for them, and put up with ...”

“... and the American plenty. He was the ideal son of a platonic union between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy godfather. Apparent lack of inner struggle and purring efficiency made it possible to take him for granted. ‘No one has ever sat around worrying about Updike, the way one apparently worried about Wolfe ...”

“... Hemingway had quite managed it, and Henry James had defected to England. From Henry Miller to J.D. Salinger, any aspiring genius who did not have a shot at it was not doing his duty by Uncle Sam. The truth is, of course, that the GAN had long been written – for what is Moby Dick if not the Great White Whale as put down on paper by the Great White Male? But ...”

“... The writing isn’t like anyone’s I can think of, but the names of Raymond Carver and J.D. Salinger may point us roughly in the right direction. The prose is oblique and uninsistent, the stories are seemingly inconsequential: but you find yourself laughing and wanting to go back to see why. The opening story describes a party at a young ...”

“... 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 ...”