JD Salinger: J.D. Salinger author ‘Catcher of the Rye’ Dead at 91

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JD Salinger, the famous author of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ was reported dead today at the age of 91. The death this week of J.D. Salinger ends one of literature’s most mysterious lives and intensifies one of its greatest mysteries: Was the author of “The Catcher in the Rye” keeping a stack of finished, unpublished manuscripts in a safe in his house in Cornish, N.H? Are they masterpieces, curiosities or random scribbles?

Marcia B. Paul, an attorney for JD Salinger when the author sued last year to stop publication of a “Catcher in the Rye” sequel, would not get on the phone Thursday.

His son, Matt Salinger, referred questions about the safe to Westberg.

Stories about a possible JD Salinger trove have been around for a long time. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told JD Salinger years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home. A year earlier, author and former JD Salinger girlfriend Joyce Maynard had written that JD Salinger used to write daily and had at least two novels stored away.

JD Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91, began publishing short stories in the 1940s and became a sensation in the 1950s after the release of “Catcher in the Rye,” a novel that helped drive the already wary author into near-total seclusion. JD Salinger last book, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour,” came out in 1963 and his last published work of any kind, the short story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in The New Yorker in 1965.

Because so little is known about what JD Salinger was doing, it’s so easy to guess. McInernay said he has an old girlfriend who met JD Salinger and was told that the author was mostly writing about health and nutrition. Lish said JD Salinger told him back in the 1960s that he was still writing about the Glass family, featured in much of JD Salinger’s work.

But the JD Salinger papers might exist only in our dreams, like the second volume of Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” which the Russian author burned near the end of his life. The JD Salinger safe also could turn into a version of Henry James’ novella “The Aspern Papers,” in which the narrator’s pursuit of a late poet’s letters ends with his being told that they were destroyed.

Margaret Salinger, the author’s daughter, wrote in a memoir published in 2000 that JD Salinger had a precise filing system for his papers: A red mark meant the book could be released “as is,” should the author die. A blue mark meant that the manuscript had to be edited.

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” JD Salinger told The New York Times in 1974. “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

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