There's A Lot To Learn About Salinger

Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people--and published in coordination with the international theatrical release of a major documentary film from the Weinstein Company--Salinger is a global cultural event, the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the 20th century.

For more than 50 years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies.  Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information.  Salinger remains an enigma.  The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed.

No longer.

In the 8 years since Salinger was begun, and especially in the three years since Salinger's death, the authors interviewed more than 200 people on five different continents, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger.  This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salingers's WWII brothers-in-arms, his family members, close friends, lovers, classmates, neighbors, editors, publishers, New Yorker colleagues and people whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family.  Shields and Salemo illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger's life, a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers.   Provided unprecedented access to more than 100 photographs never before published, diaries, letters, legal records and secret documents.  Readers will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger's meticulously built-up wall.  The result is the definitive portrait of one of  the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.


Get the 411 on the five unpublished books that were found during the research for Salinger HERE.

The First Authoritative Biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a Writer Who Changed the Conversation of American Literatur

In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no ("A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer"). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: "O.K." For the next year—a year that ended up being Vonnegut's last—Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters.

And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut's concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut's works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

Read and excerpt here.

Read in interview with the author here.