"'The paper (Salinger had a fondness for goldenrod-colored sheets) and the typeface, ordinary in themselves, are the same ones with which the writer, in between letters, must have been producing hundreds of pages of extraordinary, unpublished fiction. Even the envelopes tell a story of growing fame and isolation.'..."
There are bits in most of his fiction I admire (especially Franny & Zooey), but I think Catcher in the Rye is just about the worst book ever, and I think Mary McCarthy got Salinger just about right. In the wake of his death, I remember hearing of an early fan letter he sent to Hemingway being recovered, it was written not long after Salinger's first story was published in the New Yorker, and I also seem to remember some rare candid photographs published in the New Yorker, pictures when he was still living in New York and hadn't gone crazy. The real questions are, of course: has he been writing fiction, how much of it is any good, and how long will it take to get published?
