In death, reclusive author JD Salinger leaves readers with one final mystery
Most of us love a good mystery.
So within hours of J.D. Salinger’s death last week, literary pundits were circling like vultures around a tantalizing question: What’s in the safe?
The safe, allegedly as big as a room, is in Salinger’s hilltop house in Cornish, N.H., where the solitary author lived like a hermit for five decades. Rumor has it that Salinger locked away at least a couple (and maybe as many as 15) unpublished manuscripts.
“I like to write. I love to write,” Salinger told the New York Times in 1974, one of the few interviews he granted in a half-century. “But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
Given Salinger’s phobic fear of publishing and his flair for drama, we can only wonder what he might have written during all those years of self-imposed isolation. “The Catcher in the Rye, Part 2”?
Maybe not as crazy as it sounds. Six months ago Salinger sued to block publication of a purported sequel to his novel of adolescent angst, one of the most familiar English-language books of the past century. Maybe the lawsuit wasn’t about money, or reputation, or literary license. Maybe Salinger simply didn’t want somebody else writing a “Catcher” sequel because he had his own version stashed in the safe.
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