Salinger

For more than 50 years, J. D. Salinger, the ever-elusive author of , 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 to the man, and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed. Director Shane Salerno and author David Shields attempt to penetrate the author’s meticulously built-up wall with , released simultaneously as a documentary and a written biography. The project was eight years in the making and includes interviews with hundreds of people, including Salinger's friends, lovers and colleagues, many of whom have never gone on record before. Also, luminaries such as filmmakers Philip Seymour Hoffman, Martin Sheen and Robert Towne, authors Tom Wolfe, E. L. Doctorow and Gore Vidal, and Pulitzer Prize winners A. Scott Berg and Elizabeth Frank all talk about Salinger's influence on their lives, their work and culture as a whole. Gaining access to previously unseen film footage, photographs and other materials, the film shows Salinger's life in full: his childhood, his painstaking work methods, his marriages, his private world and the secrets he left behind after his death in 2010.