Salinger

Salinger (2013) is an American documentary you can watch online on iFILM — director Shane Salerno spent a decade investigating J. D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye, who withdrew from public life and stayed gone.

Salinger published his last story in 1965 and died in 2010 at his compound in Cornish, New Hampshire — nearly fifty years of silence. Salerno pieces together what happened: the wartime experience that broke something in him, a recurring pattern with very young women, the writing he kept from the world, and the choice to stop publishing entirely. Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, and Philip Seymour Hoffman appear on camera; so do former associates who had never spoken on record.

The film makes direct claims about unpublished manuscripts waiting in Salinger's archives. You can dispute the framing — the research is dense enough that the argument goes somewhere. Stream Salinger on iFILM.