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A few writers are so enveloped in their reputations that their work is virtually impossible to read without being distracted by their fame and their relation to the public. No one else has ever been known in quite the way that J. D. Salinger has--first as the creator of a voice and a consciousness in which a vast number of very different readers have recognized themselves, second as an elusive figure uneasy with his audience and distrustful of his public, and finally as a kind of living ghost, fiercely protective of his isolation. Having created a body of fiction in which the author invites the love of his readers, he has become, in biographer Ian Hamilton's phrase, "famous for not wanting to be famous." The mythic status of Salinger the man is so compelling that trying to look clearly at his fiction, as fiction, is difficult and complicated. Yet the effort justifies the difficulty: many of his stories are evocative period pieces, catching the spirit of that time in which he defined large areas of sensibility; and some of the stories transcend their historical interest, as luminous examples of the art of short fiction.
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