Or maybe earlier:
Salinger was the great short story writer of his era. I’m in agreement that “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is among the top five of the century.
And like everyone else who is truly honest about the subject, I’ve been waiting for him to die for years just to satisfy my curiosity about whether he’s been writing and whether any of it, even one line, is worth reading.
What if he’s got a vault, all right, but it turns out to be stacks and stacks of BVS fan fiction?
I wonder if Mark David Chapman sat down and started reading a Lennon biography when he heard the news about Salinger…
What’s BVS?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I do. We should tell the estate to Caulfield up.
I wonder how many people who saw Field of Dreams (but didn’t read the book it was based on, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe) realize that the character of Terence Mann was originally Salinger in the book. Kinsella used the real-life author as a character because Salinger had written stories that had characters named “Kinsella” in them (including Catcher in the Rye).
I read CitR, but didn’t care for it at all. I never understood why it was immensely popular with some people, including a lot of educators. I felt no kinship with Holden Caulfield.
Don’t write me screeds explaining why it’s popular and why I should like it – I’ve read enough essays on it by now. But it never spoke to me in a meaningful way.
The usual. She wrote an essay when she was 18 and he, 35 years older, took notice. They exchanged letters, she dropped out of Yale and went to live with him (and his daughter, I think…?). He dropped her. Anyway, she’s been portrayed badly for whatever reasons. Invading his privacy, maybe. Writing a memoir 25 years later. I don’t think I have to tell you he’s got quite a devoted fanbase.
One creepy detail I remember reading was how he brought her to the gynecologist because she was ‘too tight’ or something similar. At 18. Ew.
I am a huge fan of his work, though. Oh well. Never meet your heroes.
I promise, here and now, that if I ever become a successful novelist, that I’m going to do at least a token example of something like this—probably even a crossover with my own work—and leave it in a vault for after I’m dead.
The more serious and respected my works are, the more gruesomely stupid I’ll make it. I swear it. 
NBC reports visitors spoke of notebooks in great profusion. Piled, not shelved, natch.
Probably an editor’s dream and a publisher’s nightmare. If there’s that much, I imagine most will never see daylight whatever is in them.
As someone who was forced to read his blathering shit, I can only say that I am not sorry for his death.
Whiny, screwed up author. The world can only be improved by his passing. He was way over-rated and hid behind “I am a recluse” as an excuse.
Why, thank you so much for dropping by to make this classy post, Mr. Class.
Doesn’t give too much detail.
The opposite. Publisher makes money, editor has to make sense of that shit.
I did exactly that (I am a published novelist, I don’t know if I’d say successful). I did a crossover of my YA baseball novel and Lovecraft for my blog.
It actually reads like something Holden Coffield would write, so maybe Ghardester meant it as a tribute.
I’m in the middle of teaching The Catcher in the Rye to my Honors Juniors. It’s the first book all year they’ve actually enjoyed!
Perhaps. I remember ‘the book’ the same way that a vegetarian would remember being force-fed hot dogs.
I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth and still wish I could regurgitate the thing from my mind.