The Untold Truth Of J.D. Salinger

As well as his marriages, Salinger had a great number of affairs throughout his life, with much younger women. One of these women, Joyce Maynard, dealt a blow to Salinger in the late 1990s when she exposed Salinger's obsessive behavior. According to The New York Times, she was a college freshman during their 10-month affair, and her book revealed details of Salinger's life: He ate frozen peas for breakfast; he had developed an unhealthy attachment to homeopathy. She also accused him of being "sexually manipulative." Two years later, Salinger's own daughter, Margaret, published another exposé that The Times says accused him of abuse and luridly listed his many bizarre obsessions, from acupuncture to urine-drinking.

Such accounts of the secretive author's private life irreparably damaged Salinger's reputation in his last decade and appeared widely in his many obituaries when he finally died in 2010, aged 91. But in 2013, one more lurid detail hit the headlines, when a new book, Salinger, by David Shields and Shane Salerno, made a surprising claim. In addition to the traumas he suffered in the war, much of Salinger's neurosis came from the shame he felt about the fact he had only one testicle, per the Atlantic. Shields and Salerno, who say that two women in Salinger's life had verified the deformity, claim in the book that "The war was one wound, but his body was the other. It was the combination of these wounds that made Salinger."

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