My Salinger year

Resource Information

The work My Salinger year represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Randwick City Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

My Salinger year

Statement of responsibility

Joanna Rakoff

Creator

• Smith Rakoff, Joanna, 1972-

Author

• Smith Rakoff, Joanna, 1972-

Subject

• Literature publishing -- United States -- History -- 20th century
• Literature publishing -- United States -- History -- 21st century
• Authors, American -- 21st century -- Biography
• Smith Rakoff, Joanna, 1972-
• Salinger, J. D., (Jerome David), 1919-2010
• Literary agents -- New York (State) | New York -- Biography

Genre

• Biography

Language

eng

Summary

At 23, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J.D. Salinger. She spends her days in the plush, wood-panelled agency, where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches, and at night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Brooklyn apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities and struggling to trust her own artistic sense, Joanna is given the task of answering Salinger's voluminous fan mail. Poignant, keenly observed and irresistibly funny, this book is a memoir about literary New York in the late 1990s, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself swept into one of the last great stories and entangled with one of the last great figures of the century. Above all, it is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer and a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives

Biography type

contains biographical information

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Target audience

adult