‘The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England’
By Nicholas Jenkins
Belknap Press, 768 pages

‘Salinger’s Soul: His Personal and Religious Odyssey’
By Stephen B. Shepard
Post Hill Press, 240 pages

Writers are no longer central to American culture in the way that Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Faulkner were treated. The late Joan Didion did come under the spotlight, but Norman Mailer before his death advised a rising generation to consider directing films. Most writers had had it. 

Yet, literary biographies continue to be published, and I have to wonder: Who cares? How many people entering a bookstore would recognize the name W.H. Auden? Salinger might be different, as he is still taught in school (I think), but even literary-minded readers might well ask, as they do with writers such as Sylvia Plath: “Haven’t they been done to death?”

So, if you pick Nicholas Jenkins’s book off a bookstore shelf, you’ll get what I think a literary biographer now has to do: Start with basics, which means a chronology of the author’s life, and then provide enticing chapter titles, such as “Mining and the Countryside: Haunted Pastoralism, 1922-1925” and “Strange Meetings: English in Germany, 1928-1929.” The Epilogue in this case, “The Island’s Caliban,” is perhaps too literary for a demotic age.

Even before the biographer accosts Auden, we get a quotation from Freud, writing in 1915 about what World War I did to the human psyche. This is Mr. Jenkins’s way of showing why Auden matters — what happened to him also happened, in some form, to millions of others:

“In the confusion of wartime in which we are caught up, relying as we must on one-sided information, standing too close to the great changes that have already taken place or are beginning to, and without a glimmering of the future that is being shaped, we ourselves are at a loss as to the significance of the impressions which press in upon us and as to the value of the judgements we form.”

Out of the trauma of World War I and its aftermath, the poet Auden went in pursuit of another world — in Germany, in America, in his own homosexual experiences. You don’t have to be a Freudian to believe Freud was on to something that is crucial for the understanding of the poet and his poetry.

Perhaps, if there is even a section on biography in the bookstore you frequent (doing it all online won’t work because you can’t see the books lined up against themselves), you’ll spot “Salinger’s Soul,” with an Introduction that couldn’t be simpler: “Jerome David Salinger remains one of our best-known but least-understood writers.” 

The third sentence in the introduction mentions that Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951) sells about 200,000 copies a year, and yet by the third paragraph the author has dropped out of sight, publishing nothing after 1965. In paragraph four, we are told his story is not over — because his son is planning to publish the work his father wrote between 1965 and his death in 2010.

The decision not to publish has to do with Salinger’s disparagement of the ego and his attraction to Eastern mysticism. Mr. Shepard has read the Salinger biographies and scholarship and still wonders about the author’s spiritual journey. The biographer writes about all of it in an engaging personal way, almost as if he was in the aisle of that bookstore, pitching his approach to us. 

Both biographers, in an age when literary biography counts for so little, are not taking their subjects for granted — asserting that we should, in other words, be interested in them or interested in them again. Like Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Shepard knows how to employ an enticing quotation — as in the wry refusal by the main character in “Catcher,” Holden Caulfield, to engage in the customary forms of literary address:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Biography: A User’s Guide.”