jd salinger’s son has confirmed for the first time that the late author of the catcher in the rye wrote a significant amount of work that has never been seen, and that he and his father’s widow are “going as fast as can”. ” to prepare it for publication.
salinger died in 2010, leaving behind a small but perfectly formed body of published work that has not been added since the 1965 new yorker story, hapworth 16, 1924. rumors have circulated for years that the creator of One of the most enduring characters of the 20th century’s books, Holden Caulfield continued to write for the next few decades he spent in Cornish, a New Hampshire town, far from the public eye.
You are reading: Jd salinger new books 2016
In an exclusive interview with The Guardian, his son Matt Salinger has finally, definitively revealed that his father never stopped writing and that almost “everything he wrote will at some point be shared.”
See Also: 21 Best Baking Books of All Time from Dorie Greenspan to Alice Medrich
matt salinger said his father “was just bursting with ideas and thoughts…he would drive the car and stop to write something and laugh to himself, sometimes he would read it to me, sometimes he wouldn’t.” -and next to each chair he had a notebook.
“He just decided that the best thing for his writing was not to have a lot of interactions with people, particularly literati,” he said. “He didn’t want to play in those poker games, he wanted to because he would encourage all aspiring writers to do, you know, stew in their own juices.”
Matt Salinger, actor and producer, squashed reports that emerged in 2013 about five new books by his father, including a short story about Holden Caulfield and another based on Salinger’s brief marriage to Sylvia, a Nazi collaborator. the reports came from a documentary about the author, to which his closest family did not formally contribute; matt described the rumors as “total rubbish” that “bear little to no relation to reality…anyone who understood my father would find the idea hysterically amusing that he would write a book about his brief first marriage. it’s way beyond the realm of plausibility.”
He didn’t reveal details about the stories, though it seems likely that there will be more about the glass family, who appear frequently in Salinger’s published short stories. he described his father’s later work as “non-linearly evolving”, and said that “it’s clear that he was after a different game.”
He and Salinger’s widow, Colleen O’Neill, with whom he is in charge of the literary estate, have been working on the material since 2011. He said it was not yet ready for publication.
“He wanted me to organize it, and because of the scope of the work, I knew it would take a long time. this was someone who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. so there is no hesitation or protection: when it’s ready, we’re going to share it,” he said. this will take years, he admitted, though he expects less than a decade: “I don’t owe an apology, I don’t think so, but his readers should know that we’re going as fast as we can… I feel the pressure to do this, more than he does.”
See Also: Steven Erikson – Book Series In Order
invisible writing, said matt salinger, “it will definitely disappoint people who don’t care about it, but for real readers… i think it will be tremendously well received by those people and they will be affected in the way that each reader expect to be affected when they open a book. It doesn’t necessarily change, but something rubs off that can lead to change.”
“When my father said that everything he has to say is in his fiction, believe it, it is there. I think that when more of his writings are made accessible, he covers everything that would interest the discerning reader. my job is to help make that happen as soon as possible and stay out of the way,” he said.
He has also worked against the republication of several of his father’s early stories, stories that Salinger himself had said would be “unfair” to publish. “Suppose you have a coat you like and someone breaks into your closet and steals it. This is how I feel,” the author told the New York Times in 1974, after the publication of two volumes of his previously unpublished works. Matt Salinger described them as “juvenile exercises, part of the process of him, the development of him as an artist.”
“I don’t do it lightly, it’s not fun,” he said of blocking the post. “I do it because my father would have done it and out of love for him, and out of love and protection for his work and his books.”
See Also: Fern Michaels Books In Publication & Chronological Order – Book Series