J. D. Salinger - Later Publicity

Later Publicity

In 1999, 25 years after the end of their relationship, Joyce Maynard put up for auction a series of letters Salinger had written to her. Maynard's memoir of her life and her relationship with Salinger, At Home in the World: A Memoir, was published the same year. Among other topics, the book described how Maynard's mother had consulted with her on how to appeal to the aging author (dressing like a child), and described Maynard's relationship with him at length. In the ensuing controversy over both the memoir and the letters, Maynard claimed that she was forced to auction the letters for financial reasons; she would have preferred to donate them to Beinecke Library. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,500 and announced his intention to return them to Salinger.

A year later, Salinger's daughter Margaret by his second wife Claire Douglas, published Dream Catcher: A Memoir. In her book, she described the harrowing control Salinger had over her mother and dispelled many of the Salinger myths established by Ian Hamilton's book. One of Hamilton's arguments was that Salinger's experience with post-traumatic stress disorder left him psychologically scarred, and that he was unable to deal with the traumatic nature of his war service. Though Ms. Salinger allowed that "the few men who lived through 'Bloody Mortain,' a battle in which her father fought, were left with much to sicken them, body and soul," she also painted a picture of her father as a man immensely proud of his service record, maintaining his military haircut and service jacket, and moving about his compound (and town) in an old Jeep.

Both Margaret Salinger and Maynard characterized the author as a devoted film buff. According to Margaret, his favorite movies include Gigi, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps (Phoebe's favorite movie in The Catcher in the Rye), and the comedies of W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. Predating VCRs, Salinger had an extensive collection of classic movies from the 1940s in 16 mm prints. Maynard wrote that "he loves movies, not films," and his daughter argued that her father's "worldview is, essentially, a product of the movies of his day. To my father, all Spanish speakers are Puerto Rican washerwomen, or the toothless, grinning-gypsy types in a Marx Brothers movie." Lillian Ross, a staff writer for The New Yorker and longtime friend of Salinger, wrote following his death, "Salinger loved movies, and he was more fun than anyone to discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen Grand Illusion ten times.)"

Margaret also offered many insights into other Salinger myths, including her father's supposed long-time interest in macrobiotics and involvement with "alternative medicine" and Eastern philosophies. A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret's brother Matt discredited the memoir in a letter to The New York Observer. He disparaged his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and stated: "I can't say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes."