Kvetcher in the Rye

by Greg Palast

In the sixth grade, the Boys' Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying around The Catcher in the Rye I think because it had the word "fuck" in it. Since the Boys' Vice-Principal hadn't read the book - and I don't think he'd ever read any book - he couldn't tell me why.

But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon. She wanted to save me from the world's vice-principals, the guys who wanted to train you in obedience to idiots and introduce you the adult world of fear and punishment. Mrs. Gordon wanted to protect the need of a child to run free.

That's, of course, how the word fuck got into Salinger's book. For the 5% of you who haven't read it, the main character of the book, Holden Caulfield, tries to erase the f-word off the wall of a New York City school. He doesn't want little kids like his sister Phoebe to see it, that somehow it would trigger an irreversible loss of her childhood innocence:

I thought Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.

Which is where the title came from. Salinger's Caulfield, pushed to the edge of his own youth and directed to prepare himself for the job market, could see for himself only one career: as a catcher in the rye. He imagined a bunch of kids playing away happily in a rye field, but a field on a cliff's-edge. Every time a child, lost in their game, would drift toward the edge, Caulfield's job would be to catch them before they fell.

Any other job would just turn you into a "phony," that is, an adult. All adults were phonies, even the nice ones, who took jobs they hated, taught textbooks and catechisms they didn't believe and lived lives of self-inflicted disappointments, while pretending it was all OK. Then with phony grins, they'd demand that you join their painful parade of delusion and decay.

Nearly half a century after I covered up Salinger's book in a carefully folded brown wrapper, I thought I'd read it to my twins. They were now eleven, in the 6th grade.

But I couldn't. In his 1956 book, Salinger had railed against a post-war world of boys in school blazers trying to get to "first base" with their steady dates. America itself was an adolescent, and despite the police beatings of marchers in Alabama, despite the "drop, tuck and don't look at the flash!" drills we did weekly in Mrs. Gordon's class to prepare for the Russian nuclear attack, America was still weirdly, optimistically child-like.

We knew then that the world could only get better: we would go to the moon and eventually, vacation there. JFK announced the Alliance for Progress and poverty would end in Appalachia; and Paul McCartney wanted to hold our hand. Every nasty meanie, like the police in Selma, was met by a legion of victorious innocents led by Martin Luther King. So we all held hands in a circle while Pete Seeger strummed "We shall overcome." Everyone would get a scholarship; and we really, truly believed we would overcome.

Even the social critics - Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac - were just big, mischievous kids.

Yes, there were a bunch of old phonies like Joe McCarthy and the Boys' Vice-Principal, but their days were numbered.

Then we fell over the cliff.

A bullet through the skull replaced Kennedy with Nixon. We shall overcome was replaced with the vicious "Southern Strategy;" the Cold War exploded in hot jungles; then came the idiot wasteland of the regimes of Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bushes, a degenerative march as the machine of America rusted and died.

And here we are today, begging for spare parts from China and my daughter glued to YouTube videos of Lady Ga-Ga's crotch, and my son slicing off a cop's head in Grand Theft Auto and a President, telegenic and painfully hollow, playing the lost and ineffectual shepherd over an electorate divided between the terrified and the greedy. In place of prophets, we are offered a caravan of kvetching clowns piling out of the Volkswagen on MSNBC.

There's no way to wipe the fuck off this smeared planet. I'm supposed to try. I'm an investigative reporter, meaning I have a professional commitment to the childish belief that if I shout loud enough, I can warn people away from the cliff's edge.

Well, it's better than a real job, but no less "phony," no less of a petty illusion.

I'm holding this book, the brown wrapper lost who the hell knows when, and I know it would just be laughable, inscrutably ancient to those wisened, worldly children of mine.

I've put it back on my shelf.

You stand on the cliff edge and there's no one left to catch.

Jerome David Salinger 1919-2010.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting. Sign up for Greg Palast's investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com.

'Catcher in the Rye' author's unpublished work

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2010/01/29/2010-01-29_whats_in_jd_salingers_safe_mystery_shrouds_catcher_in_the_rye_authors_unpublishe.html

Mystery shrouds 'Catcher in the Rye' author's unpublished work
By Anjali Khosla Mullany
Daily News Writer
Friday, January 29th 2010

With the death of J.D. Salinger, the world has lost one of the greatest - and most publicity-shy - authors of the 20th century.

Salinger's passing has, however, caused many of his admirers to wonder if they will soon be gaining access to a treasure trove of his unpublished works.

Salinger, who is most famous for his quintessential New York novel "The Catcher in the Rye," died yesterday in New Hampshire.

Unhappy with the fame that met his literary success, Salinger spent most of his life out of the public eye, and had not published new work in the decades preceding his death.

Only four of his books were ever published - "The Catcher in the Rye;" "Nine Stories;" "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction" and "Franny and Zooey."

"Hapworth 16, 1924," an epistolary novella written from the perspective of one of Salinger's most famous characters, Seymour Glass, was published in The New Yorker in 1964.

Since the 1990s, publication of a book reissue of the manuscript has been periodically postponed or cancelled. It seems likely that Salinger continued to write after his withdrawal from the public eye.

In rare interviews with the New York Times and the Boston Globe, he said that he had not given up writing. He told the Globe in 1980, "I love to write, and I assure you I write regularly."

As he had told the New York Times in 1974, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

Salinger fans want to know if his unpublished works have been preserved after his death, and if the works will be made available to the public.

A representative at Salinger's literary agency, Harold Ober Associates, told the Daily News that the agency has "no plans at this time" to release any of his unpublished work, or to re-release "Hapworth 16, 1924."

For now, the world will have to continue to wait and see if new Salinger works will be published.

J.D. Salinger: "Keep Your Hands Off My Legacy"

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957865,00.html

J.D. Salinger: "Keep Your Hands Off My Legacy"
Andrea Sachs
Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010

J.D. Salinger may have hated visitors, but he sure loved lawyers. The famously reclusive author fended off all attempts by others to adapt his writings, particularly his masterwork, Catcher in the Rye. He even said "no" to Steven Spielberg regarding a film version of his classic novel. But now that the elusive Salinger is gone, what will happen to his iron-fisted control over his writings?

Precious little, say legal experts. If Salinger had the foresight to invite a good estate planner to Cornish, New Hampshire, it's likely that he will rule his literary empire from the grave. "Legally, his death should have no significance at all, " says Richard Dannay, an intellectual property lawyer in New York City. "His works are in copyright, and remain in copyright."

Those copyrights pass to his estate, say lawyers, and Salinger may have left detailed directions about how to proceed. If his extraordinarily private style held true in his will-making, would-be adapters of the Salinger oeuvre are out of luck. "If he says that he doesn't want a revised work, or a secondary work or a derivative work, or he doesn't want anything related to Catcher in the Rye licensed, then whoever is managing his estate would be bound by that, " says Jon Tandler, a publishing lawyer in Denver. "He can say, 'Thou shall not create a sequel.'"

That's just what a Swedish author calling himself J.D. California (real name: Fredrik Colting) tried to do, in a book named 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. But just before his death, the ever-vigilant Salinger sent his lawyers after California and his tiny publisher, Windupbird Publishing, suing them in June in federal court in Manhattan. The judge, Deborah Batts, sided with Salinger, indefinitely banning the publication of the book in this country. (It had been published in Britain.) The judge rejected the argument that the book was a parody, which would have been legally permissible. The judge's ruling has been appealed to the Second Circuit, where the case is still pending.

Jessie Beeber, an attorney for Colting and his publisher, says her clients will persist in their appeal. But, she adds, "We don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of the lawsuit right now. We think Mr. Salinger should have an opportunity to be laid to rest in peace, and our thoughts are with his family. We all just really appreciate the effect and influence Salinger and his works have had on our society."

Of course, Salinger's executor or heirs could try to slip around the author's wishes. But, so far, the late author's partisans would seem to have nothing to worry about in that regard. The Salinger ranks are holding tight, albeit as quietly as their famous client. Marcia Paul, the New York City lawyer who represented Salinger in the 60 Years Later case, had nothing to say when contacted. "I really don't have any comment about anything," she maintained. Likewise, his agent, Phyllis Westberg, is a woman of few words: "J.D. Salinger books will stay in print. I have no further comment."

Will stay in print, indeed. With Catcher required reading in every English department in America, sales are only likely to increase in the wake of the author's death. It has already sold a staggering 35 million copies worldwide, 59 years after its publication in 1951.

But even J.D. Salinger isn't above the law. In the future, Catcher in the Rye and his handful of short stories will have to go into the public domain, where they're open game. But don't hold your breath. That will be in 2080. Is that Holden Caufield we hear snickering?

Author Jay McInerney on J.D. Salinger

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2010/01/29/author-jay-mcinerney-on-j-d-salinger/

Jan 29, 2010
Author Jay McInerney on J.D. Salinger
Keith Staskiewicz

The death of J.D. Salinger yesterday has had reverberations across the landscape of modern American literature. Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and Story of My Life, gives EW his take on the author’s legacy.

“When I heard about Salinger’s death yesterday I realized I hadn’t thought about him in quite a while. He left the stage a long time ago and his influence is so pervasive that it’s easy to forget how different the cultural landscape would probably be if he’d never come along. Like Mark Twain, whom he mimicked in the opening line of Catcher in the Rye, he injected a new slangy colloquial tone into our literature. It’s impossible to imagine the work of Philip Roth or John Updike without his influence. Several generations later, writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers still seemed to be channeling Holden.

“Twenty-six years ago, when I published my first novel, more than a few reviewers remarked on my indebtedness to Salinger. Some commentators went so far as to suggest that my publisher had deliberately mimicked the cover art of the paperback edition of Catcher. I wasn’t necessarily displeased but I was baffled; back in 1984, it had been years since I’d read Salinger or really thought about him. In graduate school, we weren’t reading or discussing Franny and Zooey and I wasn’t remotely conscious of any influence when I was writing Bright Lights, Big City. I’d read Salinger in high school. I said as much in interviews. I’d point to what I thought of as more obvious influences like Hunter S. Thompson and Raymond Carver without stopping to consider the extent to which they were influenced by Salinger. I guess I was writing under the influence of Salinger, whether or not I was conscious of it. He’s the most influential American writer since Hemingway.

“As for the purported trove of fiction, I’m skeptical. Not of its existence, but of its quality. Anyone who’s read “Seymour: An Introduction” or most especially his last published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924” will wonder just how readable his later fiction is. “Hapworth” is a rambling, self referential, improbable letter home written by an alleged seven year old at camp. By the time he wrote it, Salinger seems to have decided to dispense with most of the niceties of storytelling, and to be talking to himself more rather than to the readers of Catcher in the Rye. I suspect we are going to be disappointed, but I would love to be proven wrong.”

Stephen King on J.D. Salinger

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2010/01/28/stephen-king-j-d-salinger/

Jan 28, 2010
Stephen King on J.D. Salinger: 'The last of the great post-WWII American writers'

I wasn’t a huge Salinger fan, but I’m sorry to hear of his passing — the way you’d feel if you heard an eccentric, short-tempered, but often fascinating uncle had passed away. Not as great a loss as Beverly Jensen (her marvelous The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay will be published this summer), who wrote only one book before dying of cancer at the age of 49, or of Raymond Carver, who was barely into his 50s; Salinger was, after all, in his 90s.

But it is a milestone of sorts, because Salinger was the last of the great post-WWII American writers, and in Holden Caulfield — maybe the greatest American-boy narrator since Huck Finn — he created an authentic Voice of the Age: funny, anxious, at odds with himself, and badly lost.

Salinger’s death may answer one question that has intrigued readers, writers, and critics for nearly half a century — what literary trove of unpublished work may he have left behind? Much? Some? Or none? Salinger is gone, but if we’re lucky, he may have more to say, even so.

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/bunch_of_phonies_mourn_j_d?utm_source=slate_rss_1

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger
January 28, 2010 Issue 46•04

CORNISH, NH — In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

J.D. Salinger, ’The Catcher in the Rye’ Author, Dies

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-28/j-d-salinger-the-catcher-in-the-rye-author-dies-at-91.html

J.D. Salinger, ’The Catcher in the Rye’ Author, Dies at 91
January 28, 2010
By Nancy Moran

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- J.D. Salinger, the reclusive author whose 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye” captured the pain of teenage angst and became a fixture of U.S. high school English courses, died today. He was 91.

Salinger’s son, speaking on behalf of the family and through the Harold Ober literary agency, said the author died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire.

Salinger was known almost as much for his hermitic lifestyle as his only full-length novel and its emblematic protagonist, Holden Caulfield. In 1953, he withdrew to a farm in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, and limited his contact with the literary world. He hadn’t published a story since 1965.

“He was famous for not wanting to be famous,” wrote the late British biographer Ian Hamilton in his 1988 book, “In Search of J.D. Salinger.”

Still, fans and journalists sought out Salinger over the decades in letters and trips to New Hampshire. His last-known interview was in 1980 with Betty Eppes, a reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate whose quest to meet the author was turned into a feature for the Paris Review.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” told in the slang-filled narrative of the troubled 16-year-old prep-school student Caulfield, turned Salinger into an American literary star. The novel marked a break from fictional depictions of youth that eschewed themes of self, sexuality and alienation and is credited with jump-starting the so-called Beat Generation of writers including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

Best Seller

Mark David Chapman was carrying a copy of the book when he shot and killed Beatle John Lennon outside the singer’s Manhattan residence, the Dakota, in December 1980.

Salinger published more than two dozen short stories and novellas, but none gained the critical acclaim of “The Catcher in the Rye.” The book remains in the top 10 of best-selling works of classic fiction on Amazon.com’s Web site.

Salinger’s plan in the late 1990s to turn his last published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” from a 1965 edition of the New Yorker magazine, into book form never materialized.

Jerome David Salinger was born on New Year’s Day, 1919, in New York, the only son of a food importer, Solomon Salinger. His mother, Miriam, was of Scotch-Irish decent and he had an older sister, Doris.

In 1934, Salinger was enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, by his father after having spent two years at the private McBurney School in Manhattan. He was an average student, a member of the school’s drama club and editor of the class of 1936’s yearbook, according to Hamilton. He later studied at New York University.

Learning to Write

After traveling to Europe to learn his father’s business, he attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and took an evening writing course at Columbia University in New York. He never received a degree.

His first work, “The Young Folks,” a vignette of awkward young adults at a party, appeared in 1940 in Story magazine, which was published by Columbia instructor and editor Whit Burnett.

He dated Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, in the early 1940s. Their relationship ended when O’Neill moved to Los Angeles and married Charlie Chaplin.

Salinger entered the U.S. Army during World War II and was made a staff sergeant before joining the Counter Intelligence Corps. His infantry regiment landed on Utah Beach on “D-Day,” June 6, 1944, and he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. While with his regiment in Paris, he met Ernest Hemingway.

Effects of War

At war’s end, he was hospitalized for stress in Germany. After being discharged in November 1945, he remained in the country for six months as a civilian contractor, according to Hamilton.

His wartime experience provided the background for several of his fictional characters, including the psychologically scarred American soldier and narrator of his 1950 story “For Esme--with Love and Squalor.”

Little is known about Salinger’s first marriage, believed to be to a European woman he met while in the service. He had two children, Margaret Ann and Matthew, by second wife Claire Douglas, a 19-year-old Radcliffe student he married in the mid- 1950s. They divorced in 1967.

In 1972, Salinger wrote to 18-year-old author Joyce Maynard after reading her front-page New York Times Magazine article, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” an account of coming of age in the 1960s. Maynard dropped out of Yale University to move in with the 53-year-old writer, whom she affectionately called “Jerry.”

‘Moody and Cranky’

In 1998, she published “At Home in the World,” a memoir of their 10-month relationship before he sent her away when she sought to have a baby. Maynard described Salinger, who had been influenced by Zen Buddhism and Hinduism, as consumed with yoga, meditation, and a strict diet of whole grains and vegetables. She also said he could be “moody and cranky” and critical of her “worldly” habits, including her desire to publish and give interviews.

A year later she auctioned off his letters at Sotheby’s for more than $156,000 to help pay for her children’s college education. The successful bidder, software publisher Peter Norton, offered to return the letters to Salinger.

Salinger was married a third time to Colleen O’Neill, a woman he met in New Hampshire, in the late 1980s.

The majority of Salinger’s stories surrounded the fictional Caulfield and Glass families. “I’m Crazy,” published in Collier’s in 1945 and 1946’s “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” his New Yorker debut, introduced the character of Holden Caulfield. Two years later, the New Yorker published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which World War II veteran Seymour Glass commits suicide in a Florida hotel room while his wife is asleep.

Prolific Period

Salinger’s stories also appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle and Esquire magazines.

His 1948 wartime romance, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” was made into the 1949 movie “My Foolish Heart,” starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. Afterwards, Salinger vowed never to let another of his works be turned into a film.

In 1953, he published “Nine Stories,” a collection that included “Bananafish” and other stories from the New Yorker. “Franny and Zooey” combined separate stories about the youngest of the seven Glass siblings into book form in 1961. “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” published in 1963, combined two New Yorker stories and is narrated by Seymour’s brother, Buddy.

Holden Caulfield’s Descent

In 1965, the New Yorker published “Hapworth 16, 1924,” with a seven-year-old Seymour Glass writing a letter home from summer camp.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” which took its title from the Robert Burns’s poem “Comin’ Thro the Rye,” follows Caulfield’s descent into depression and institutionalization while fantasizing about catching and preventing children playing in a large field of rye from falling off a cliff.

“That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy,” the character tells his sister, Phoebe, after being kicked out of his fourth school, Pencey Prep.

The tale of lost innocence and alienation opened up a literary debate over whether Caulfield, in his struggle against society’s “phonies,” was inspired by Salinger’s own private- school experience and sense of disillusionment.

The novel continues to stir controversy today over its use of language -- “goddam” is repeated throughout -- and content including underage drinking and Caulfield’s hiring of a prostitute. Some U.S. schools have banned the book.

Court Case

Author Ian Hamilton’s attempt to shed light on one of the literary world’s most-reclusive figures was thwarted by a federal appeals court. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court let the decision stand.

Hamilton, who sought to quote unpublished Salinger letters stored at university libraries for a conventional biography, reverted to writing a “literary adventure story” instead, “In Search of J.D. Salinger.”

In 2000, Salinger’s estranged daughter Margaret wrote the memoir “Dream Catcher.” In it, she described a neurotic father obsessed with health fads, including homeopathy and the drinking of his own urine. Her bid a year later to sell 32 letters from the author at Sotheby’s failed.

Salinger’s last legal challenge came in June of 2009 when he sued to block the publication of a sequel to his famous novel titled, “60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye.” The following month, a federal judge blocked author Fredrik Colting and Windupbird Publishing Ltd. from releasing the book in a preliminary injunction, ruling that it borrowed “quite extensively” from the original and didn’t qualify as a parody.

J.D. Salinger is survived by his wife, daughter Margaret, son Matthew, and three grandchildren.

--With assistance from Victoria Slind-Flor. Editors: James Greiff, Steven Gittelson.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nancy Moran in New York at +1-212-617-2331 or nmoran@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at +1-212-617-5801 or jgreiff@bloomberg.net.

Terminator Movie Brings J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_terminator_movie_brings_j_d

New Terminator Movie Brings J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding
June 8, 2009 Issue 45•24

CORNISH, NH — Famed literary giant and notorious recluse J.D. Salinger, who has not published any new work since 1965, came out of hiding Monday to gush about the new film Terminator Salvation, offering the world its first glimpse into his private life since his last interview nearly 30 years ago.

"I believe that a writer's privacy is among his most precious possessions, in that personal information about him distracts readers from what is most important: the work itself," the author of The Catcher In The Rye told reporters outside the Claremont Cinema 6 theater, moments after seeing the film for the third time. "But on the other hand, the new revival of the Terminator franchise is just way too awesome for me to remain quiet any longer. Hello? Time-travel paradoxes? Freaking amazing!"

"How sweet was it when that giant robot hand reached in through the roof and grabbed that old lady?" Salinger added. "Or when those motorcycle terminators detached from its legs and started speeding toward the escaping resistance fighters? Holy crap, was that fucking cool or what?"

Salinger, 90, explained that he first became a fan of the Terminator franchise in 1991, when he saw Terminator 2: Judgment Day and found the character of the young John Connor to be "a striking figure of teenage alienation and disillusionment." His interest in the series continued with his rental of the first Terminator film, which he described as "almost as awesome as the second one," and his Amazon purchase of Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines on Blu-ray.

Salinger, whose fictional works featuring the Glass family are considered some of the most influential contributions to 20th-century American literature, stated that he "liked Terminator 3 okay," but that it was, in his opinion, "nowhere near as cool as the new film." In fact, the latest installment has so far exceeded his expectations that he has reversed nearly half a century of shunning the media.

In an interview granted to The Paris Review, The New York Review Of Books, Time, Newsweek, and Us Weekly, Salinger called Christian Bale "the most badass version of John Connor yet" and described the film's postapocalyptic war with the machines setting as "totally mind-blowing."

"I admit I was worried about it as first," Salinger explained to enthralled reporters. "The decision to go with McG as the new director seemed like a bad mistake—I mean, he made the Charlie's Angels movies for chrissakes—but boy oh boy was I worried for nothing. T4 may well be more awesome than the first three goddamn films combined, if you can believe that."

Added Salinger, "Those hydrobots are scary as shit."

He then invited reporters into his remote New Hampshire compound to discuss the movie in more detail.

"Come in, come in, sit down, there's plenty of space," an exuberant Salinger told reporters, gesturing around his sitting room, which was filled with movie posters, comic books, and other Terminator collectibles, including a life-sized statue of the T-800 Model terminator as portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. "What a frigging inspired choice to cast Bryce Dallas Howard. She made so much more sense in that part than Claire Danes."

Although the sole film made from Salinger's work, My Foolish Heart, based on his short story "Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut," was considered by Salinger to be such a bastardization of his prose that he never agreed to another adaptation, he now states that "if McG wants to do any of my stuff—'A Perfect Day For Bananafish'; Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; hell, all of Nine Stories—he has my complete permission. Anything. Anything he wants."

When asked what he thought of today's novelists, and whether he had plans to publish any new work, Salinger replied that he loved it when the helicopter crashes and John Connor gets grabbed by that terminator that's only half a torso, and then he blows it away with the mounted machine gun.

"But by far the best part is when they reveal the T-800 for the first time and it looks just like a young Schwarzenegger," said Salinger, his voice reaching a fever pitch. "I was like, 'Holy shit.' I guess they must've used CGI or something to get that face just right. But what a moment! I practically lost it, if you want to know the truth."

Besides setting the literary community abuzz, Salinger's decision to come out of seclusion has allowed scholars access to his massive archive of unpublished work for the first time. So far, critics have examined three never-before-seen novels, eight novellas, and more than two dozen short stories—all of which appear to be Terminator fan fiction.

"But make no mistake," said Salinger expert Professor Duane Hartworth of nearby Dartmouth College, "this is without a doubt the most personal and affecting body of Terminator fan fiction ever discovered."

Salinger had only one negative comment for interviewers: He condemned the TV spin-off series The Sarah Connor Chronicles, saying that people who like that show are "a bunch of goddamn phonies."