Virtual Memories Show 605:
Stephen B. Shepard
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“I wanted to tell the story of his life in seclusion, and why he became famous for not wanting to be famous.”
With Salinger’s Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey (Post Hill Press), author and retired journalist/editor Stephen B. Shepard explores the life of JD Salinger and the hidden core of an author who became famous for avoiding fame. We get into why Stephen decided to chase this elusive ghost, why Salinger didn’t make it into his previous book about Jewish American writers, whether he believes Salinger’s unpublished writing will see the light of day, and why it was important that he approach the book as biography and not literary criticism (although he does bring a reader’s voice to the book). We talk about the lack of sex in Salinger’s fiction, the uncanniness of Holden Caulfield’s voice, Salinger’s WWII trauma, his rise to fame, search for privacy, abandonment of publishing, embrace of Vedanta & ego-death, and his pattern of pursuing young women, and how it all maybe ties together. We also discuss Stephen’s career as a journalist and how it influences his writing, what he learned in building a graduate program in journalism at CUNY, the ways we both started out in business-to-business magazines (he went a lot farther than I did, editing Newsweek and Business Week), how journalism has changed over the course of his career, Philip Roth’s biography and what it means to separate the book from the writer, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Salinger’s Soul!
“I think the material [Salinger’s unpublished writing] is there, but the question is how good is it going to be. I’m not too optimistic because his last published works weren’t very good.”
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“What I learned building the curriculum for my journalism program was that everything I had learned wasn’t quite right.”
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About our Guest
Stephen B. Shepard is the Founding Dean Emeritus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He served as a senior editor at Newsweek, the editor of Saturday Review, and editor-in-chief of Business Week. From 1992 to 1994, he was president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. Shepard was also a faculty member at the Columbia Journalism School, where he was cofounder and first director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowships, a mid-career program for working journalists. A native New Yorker, Shepard graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, then received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York and his master’s degree from Columbia University.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Stephen’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Stephen by me. It’s on my instagram.