After an introduction on writing good essays, this book presents suggested topics and strategies for drafting a paper on J.D. Salinger and his works.

Presents a collection of essays analyzing Salinger's The catcher in the rye, including a chronology of his works and life.

Presents a collection of critical essays on Salinger and his works as well as a chronology of events in the author's life.

The classic 1951 novel by J.D. Salinger is analyzed.

J.D. Salinger was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was also one of its most elusive. After making his mark on the American literary scene, Salinger retreated to a small town in New Hampshire where he hoped to hide his life away from the world. With dogged determination, however, journalist and biographer Paul Alexander captured Salinger's story in this, the only complete biography of Holden Caulfield's creator published to date. Using the archives at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, NYU and the New York Public Library as well as research in New York and New Hampshire, Alexander has created a great biography of Salinger that's further enriched by interviews with some of the greatest literary figures of our time: George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Ian Hamilton, Harold Bloom, Roger Angell, A. Scott Berg, Robert Giroux, Ved Mehta, Gordon Lish and Tom Wolfe.

Salinger's reputation was secured with the publication in 1951 of his first book and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye. From then on, his famously limited literary output was devoted exclusively to short fiction. The lauded tales of Nine Stories and the longer stories and novellas, including Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, have only extended Salinger's standing as one of the most accomplished fiction writers of his time. Introduced by Harold Bloom, this volume of full-length essays offers a rare critical overview of the shorter prose offerings of this American master. Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations, a series of more than 100 volumes, presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels, and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and The Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor's note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the writer's life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition. Book jacket.