Are there Salinger works in the safe?
Source: Agencies |
January 30, 2010, Saturday
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Print Edition
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SO what about the safe?
The death this week of JD?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and intensifies one of its greatest mysteries: Was the author of "The Catcher in the Rye" keeping a stack of finished, unpublished manuscripts in a safe in his house in Cornish, New Hampshire? Are they masterpieces, curiosities or random scribbles?
And if there are publishable works, will the author's estate release them?
The Salinger camp isn't talking. No comment, says his literary representative, Phyllis Westberg, of Harold Ober Associates Inc. No plans for any new Salinger books, reports his publisher, Little, Brown & Co.
Marcia B Paul, an attorney for Salinger when the author sued last year to stop publication of a "Catcher" sequel, would not get on the phone on Thursday.
Salinger's son, Matt Salinger, referred questions about the safe to Westberg.
Neighbor
Stories about a possible Salinger trove have been around for a long time. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.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 Salinger girlfriend Joyce Maynard had written that Salinger used to write daily and had at least two novels stored away.
Salinger, who died on Wednesday at age 91, began publishing short stories in the 1940s and became a sensation in the 1950s after the release of "Catcher," a novel that helped drive the already wary author into near-total seclusion.
His 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.
Jay McInerney, a young star in the 1980s thanks to the novel "Bright Lights, Big City," is not a fan of Hapworth and is skeptical about the contents of the safe.
"I think there's probably a lot in there, but I'm not sure if it's necessarily what we hope it is," McInerney said on Thursday. "'Hapworth' was not a traditional or terribly satisfying work of fiction. It was an insane epistolary monologue, virtually shapeless and formless. I have a feeling that his later work is in that vein."
The death this week of JD?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, New Hampshire? Are they masterpieces, curiosities or random scribbles?
And if there are publishable works, will the author's estate release them?
The Salinger camp isn't talking. No comment, says his literary representative, Phyllis Westberg, of Harold Ober Associates Inc. No plans for any new Salinger books, reports his publisher, Little, Brown & Co.
Marcia B Paul, an attorney for Salinger when the author sued last year to stop publication of a "Catcher" sequel, would not get on the phone on Thursday.
Salinger's son, Matt Salinger, referred questions about the safe to Westberg.
Neighbor
Stories about a possible Salinger trove have been around for a long time. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him 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 Salinger girlfriend Joyce Maynard had written that Salinger used to write daily and had at least two novels stored away.
Salinger, who died on Wednesday at age 91, began publishing short stories in the 1940s and became a sensation in the 1950s after the release of "Catcher," a novel that helped drive the already wary author into near-total seclusion.
His 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.
Jay McInerney, a young star in the 1980s thanks to the novel "Bright Lights, Big City," is not a fan of Hapworth and is skeptical about the contents of the safe.
"I think there's probably a lot in there, but I'm not sure if it's necessarily what we hope it is," McInerney said on Thursday. "'Hapworth' was not a traditional or terribly satisfying work of fiction. It was an insane epistolary monologue, virtually shapeless and formless. I have a feeling that his later work is in that vein."
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