Amazon.com description: Product Description: In trying to research the details of J.D. Salinger's life for this book, Ian Hamilton forced the writer out of his reclusive hideaway to challenge his discoveries in an American court of law. When Ian Hamilton set out in 1983 to write a biography of Salinger, he knew that there would be difficulties. Just how great those difficulties would be, what implacable hostility he would meet from Salinger and what astonishing finds he would stumble on, he could not have guessed.;This text is the story of that quest, a literary detective story which ends in court, with a bitter and protracted lawsuit in which Salinger sought to restrict the use Hamilton could make of his letters.