New York: One of the book world's greatest mysteries is finally ending – JD Salinger's son says previously unpublished work by his late father will be coming out. In comments that appeared Friday in The Guardian, Matt Salinger confirmed longstanding reports that the author of 'The Catcher in the Rye' had continued to write decades after he stopped publishing books.
He said that he and Salinger's widow, Colleen, are "going as fast as we freaking can" to prepare the material for release. "He wanted me to pull it together and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time," Salinger said of his father, who died in 2010 and had not published work since the mid-1960s.
"This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that's a lot of material. So there's not a reluctance or a protectiveness: When it's ready, we're going to share it," he said. Salinger, who helps oversee his father's literary estate, says any new work might be years away and did not cite any specific titles or plots.
He did indicate that the Glass family made famous in such fiction as 'Franny and Zooey' would be seen again. "I feel the pressure to get this done, more than he did," he said, adding that the unseen work "will definitely disappoint people that he wouldn't care about, but as for real readers, I think it will be tremendously well received by those people and they will be affected in the way every reader hopes to be affected when they open a book. Not changed, necessarily, but something rubs off that can lead to change."
Over the past half-century, rumours and speculation intensified over if any new books existed and if they were of publishable quality. A former lover, Joyce Maynard, and Salinger's daughter, Margaret, have both contended that the author continued to write books, allegedly stored in a vault in the author's home in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Salinger rarely spoke to the media and not only stopped releasing new work but rejected any reissues or e-book editions of his published material. This year marks the centennial of his birth and signs of a new openness emerged in 2018 when his estate permitted new covers and a boxed edition of his old fiction to come out for the 100th anniversary. A Salinger exhibit is planned later this year at the New York Public Library, and other promotional events are in the works.
