I am one of the few who never really cared for J. D. Salinger’s work. To be fair, I’ve only ever read The Catcher in the Rye, which I thought was overrated and annoying. Just my opinion, I know many disagree with it. Some books just don’t speak to some people.
I happened upon a feature story called Betraying Salinger on the New York Magazine website about a small publisher’s failed attempt at publishing Salinger’s last publicly released piece of writing. Even though I don’t care much about Salinger, I found the feature very well written and interesting.
It tells about Salinger’s strange rules about the release of his piece, Hapworth 16, 1924, and his unique personality and how the publisher messed up the book deal. Anyone who likes (and doesn’t like) Salinger’s work would find this piece interesting.
Another fun thing found was a list of author’s bashing authors, like this one about Salinger:
J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962):
I don’t like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can’t stand it.
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