It explores Salinger's life, with emphasis on his military service in World War II, his post-traumatic stress disorder, his subsequent writing career, his retreat from fame, his religious beliefs and his relationships with teenage girls.

Salinger is a revelation, and offers the most complete picture of an American icon, a man deified by silence, haunted by war, frustrated in love—and more frail and human than he ever wanted the world to know.

"[15] David Ulin of Los Angeles Times wrote, that "Salinger gets the goods on an author's reclusive life... it strips away the sheen of his exceptionalism, trading in his genius for something much more real.

"[6] Laura Miller in Salon said that the book is "refreshingly frank about their subject's many shortcomings and how they might have affected his work... Salinger amply documents the author's youthful arrogance and selfishness, his infatuation with his own cleverness and his inability to see the world from the perspective of anyone who wasn't a lot like himself.

"[21] Carl Rollyson in The Wall Street Journal wrote that while the book was "engrossing," it "is biography as scrapbook, chock-full of well-known figures and well-worn stories."

"[22] In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani thought that the authors had done "an energetic job of finding sources and persuading them to talk" but the books's "Internet-age narrative" and "sloppy scholarship," made it "a sprawling, cut-and-paste collage.

"[24] "[M]uch of what is in here has no real bearing on Salinger's works themselves," wrote Martin Rubin in The Washington Times, "and is simply yet another contribution to what Joyce Carol Oates pungently termed pathography.

Louis Bayard of The Washington Post wrote that "the book offers the most complete rendering yet of Salinger's World War II service, the transformative trauma that began with the D-Day invasion and carried through the horrific Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the liberation of a Dachau subcamp."

"[27] In Los Angeles Review of Books, Cornel Bonca found Salinger to be "stuffed with lots of good raw information" and marked by a "clear, often compelling narrative."