J.D. SALINGER DEAD – RIP (HOPEFULLY WITH NO GODAMM PHONEYS BOTHERING HIM)

J.D. Salinger, dead at 91 on January 27, 2010. It’s a shock to the system to realize that someone so influential to all of us readers, is dead and gone forever—even though he was so reclusive that he virtually disappeared decades ago.

Most famous for creating Holden Caulfield the freshly expelled prep school, malcontent student who embodied everyone’s teenage angst, beginning with the first sentence of The Catcher in the Rye, “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.” From that sentence on, we were all hooked.

Salinger, like Howard Hughes was intent on fame before he got famous. In college (which he didn’t finish) he bragged about writing the great American novel. Once he did that—and changed the literary world forever—adulation followed him wherever he went. He grew to detest the limelight. He fled his Manhattan apartment and retired to a rural 90 acre farm in Cornish, New Hampshire. He gave his last interview in 1980, and was rarely seen in public.

Of course, my first question when I heard that Salinger had died was, “Had he kept writing, and would those manuscripts be published?” Recently it was announced in the press that Vladimir Nabokov’s (Lolita) wife intended to publish his last, unfinished manuscript even though he expressly told her not to if he died before finishing it.

The press is now leaking stories about Salinger, that there are no less than fifteen unpublished manuscripts moldering in a safe in his remote house.

No doubt publishers are salivating seeing as The Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 60 million copies and continues to sell 250,000 copies every year. So now we wait. Did Salinger order his manuscripts to be published after his death, or destroyed? Right now, no one knows.

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