Thought I´d bump this thread to add my five cents:-
Firstly, this is how
Nine Stories was published in Britain:-
I loved this book and still consider
A Perfect Day For Banana Fish one of my favourite short stories. We can all guess how little JD liked this presentation of his work, though.
Perhaps unintentionally, this thread seems to give the impression that JD retired after penning his
Catcher In The Rye masterpiece. In fact, he went on writing for the public for another 14 years, but met with increasingly little public interest and increasingly hostile reviews. Anyone who has struggled through
Seymour:An introduction or
Franny and Zooey or
Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters will have an idea of the creative brick wall JD was up against. He had fallen hopelessly in love with his own creations and the more he wrote, the more he exposed his limitations as a writer, causing one critic to describe him as " the greatest mind never to leave prep school."
Nonetheless, he remains an intriguing personality, and for anyone interested, I highly recommend this book:-
You may fall out of love with Salinger, but Ian Hamilton does a great job; part biog, part detective story and part ethical debate, because even though he set honourable limits on how intrusive his research would be, Hamilton still had a legal fight with JD, the cataloging of which gives this book an extra, darkly humorous dimension.
Finally, I just wanted to mention the parallel between JDS and C.S.Lewis, who also, in his lifetime, made it crystal clear that he didn´t want his work turned into a tv prog or a film. C.S.Lewis´s stepson had control of the writer´s estate, and he held out for *checks Wikipedia* forty-two years against various low-budget, well-intentioned offers for movie rights before he finally decided to forget his step-dad´s wishes and to kiss the Disney dollar. Maybe that´s what´s in store for JDS´s literary legacy too.