Salinger's Final Mystery - The Daily Beast

Salinger's Final Mystery

by Nathaniel Rich

AP Photo Novelist Nathaniel Rich mourns the loss of a literary hero—and fantasizes about the books that Salinger was possibly writing all of these years.

It is a peculiar, half-hearted thing to mourn the death of an author who has been dead to the world for nearly half a century. My mourning period didn’t begin on Thursday, but in July 1994, when I was 14, as soon as I finished Catcher in the Rye. It was renewed the next year when, reading Nine Stories, I had a strange sensation of recognition: I knew these stories already. My middle school baseball coach, on bus rides to games, would tell the team disturbing stories about the disfigured Laughing Man and about a young boy who recalls a previous life in India. These were childhood myths; not until Nine Stories did I realize they’d been written by a writer who, rumor had it, was still alive.

This very moment a giant U-Haul truck, filled with paper, may be trundling down I-95 toward the offices of The New Yorker, or Harold Ober Associates, or Little, Brown.