An exhibit, titled “JD Salinger,” is running through January 19th at the historic Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. The iconic writer died in 2010 and avoided publicity and media most of his life, A.P reported.
By: Harvey Wassenstein
The N.Y Post reported, all cell phones will be banned at this exhibit so nobody can capture any pictures of these rarely seen Salinger artifacts.
Library workers are stationed outside the gallery where more than 200 of Salinger’s artifacts are on display, telling patrons they have to check their coats and bags — and tuck their phones inside.
His literary estate approved new print editions for the first time in decades of the four books he allowed to come out in his lifetime — “The Catcher in the Rye,” ″Franny and Zooey,” ″Nine Stories” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.” And for the first time ever, the literary estate authorized e-book editions.
Visitors can se an actual manuscript of “Catcher In The Rye”.
Salinger’s estate is overseen in part by his son, Matt Salinger, who has also said that readers will, at some point, see the books his father worked on after he stopped publishing in the 1960s. In announcing the exhibit last week, the younger Salinger cited the public’s lasting curiosity, A.P reported.
“When my father’s longtime publisher, Little, Brown and Co., first approached me with plans for his centennial year, my immediate reaction was that he would not like the attention,” Matt Salinger wrote. “He was a famously private man who shared his work with millions, but his life and nonpublished thoughts with less than a handful of people, including me. But I’ve learned that while he may have only fathered two children there are a great, great many readers out there who have their own rather profound relationships with him, through his work, and who have long wanted an opportunity to get to know him better.”
Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in The New Yorker, which became home to much of his later work.
The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 and became an immediate popular success. Salinger’s depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel was widely read and controversial.
In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned the book were fired or forced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye “had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools” The book remains widely read; in 2004, the novel was selling about 250,000 copies per year, “with total worldwide sales over 10 million copies, Washington Post explained.
