He begins with an anecdote of the 4-year-old Salinger. Sonny, as he was then called, dresses in full Indian regalia, complete with feathered headdress, packs his suitcase with toy soldiers, and runs away — then waits in the lobby of his apartment building until his mother gets home. “Mother, I’m running away,” he said. “But I stayed to say goodbye to you.”

From that faint but resonant echo of Salinger’s story “Down at the Dinghy,” Beller moves on to Camp Wigwam in Maine, where Sonny spent the summer of 1930 when he was 11. Beller heads straight to a cabin called Comanches, an echo from another story, “The Laughing Man,” and feels himself caught up in a “lovely circuit” of the camp’s happiness as it flowed to Salinger, then to his work, then to his young reader, now biographer.

His search through the landscape called J. D. Salinger is modest and intense, like all of Beller’s work. What could have been just the old literary biography game of matching Salinger’s life with his fiction is, instead, a walk through a vibrant, historical, contemporary world. Beller has long run a website called Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, filled with stories of New York. This biography is a kind of Mr. Salinger’s Neighborhood. It examines what surrounds its subject as much as, sometimes more than, the man himself — as a book of echoes must.

One of the many endearing qualities of the book is Beller’s obvious enjoyment at including the perfect, irrelevant anecdote. In the chapter about Whit Burnett, Salinger’s writing teacher and the publisher of his first stories, Beller relates the moment Burnett met the woman who would become his wife and collaborator, Martha Foley. Arriving at his new job at the San Francisco newspaper where Foley worked, he told her he’d had to work his way out on the train from New York. “His job was to ride standing in the cattle car and pick up the cows when they fell over.”

Because Beller gets New York with all its nuances of class and money, he understands the Salinger family’s triumphant rise from Upper Broadway to Park Avenue and what it must have meant not just to the proud parents, but also to a boy leaving the familiar Jewish West Side for the WASPy Upper East Side. Beller bestows on his insights an invigorating physicality. As he stands in Central Park one cold, blustery day facing the now defunct private school Salinger entered in 1932 (and was expelled from in 1934), he says, “A lot can happen in the interval between school and home, especially when school and home are two points at opposite corners of Central Park.” With that simple observation — that Salinger made his way across the park twice a day, five days a week, often getting home just in time for dinner — the park’s prominence in “The Catcher in the Rye” and other Salinger works takes on a new poignancy. But the park and the city are there, Beller says, “in all kinds of ways that are less quantifiable.” A writer’s influences can be “nonliterary and often unconscious. The street lamps in Central Park at dusk, or the gray hexagonal-block sidewalks that line the perimeter of the park, which look the same today as they did when J. D. Salinger was a kid, are present in his writing without ever being mentioned. The city is itself a worn and used thing, the stones smoothed by a million heels pounding on them like tidal waves on rocks, its landscape unforgiving but also a refuge to which one can adapt, and within which one can, at least for an afternoon, disappear.”