The great mystery J.D. Salinger left behind, of course, is just what he’d been writing all these years. There have been repeated sketchy reports that he was still writing in those last 45 years or so since he stopped publishing. There were, supposedly, completed manuscripts in his lonesome house of refuge on a hill in Cornish, N.H., a house I once paid a conflicted visit to. But no one seemed to have any real evidence about what it was he was working on. Will we find reams of pages covered with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” a la The Shining? Or arcane tomes on one of his esoteric, mystical enthusiasms, such as homeopathy? Or—sigh—more, yet more Glass family sagas, centering on that supposed saint, the tedious Seymour, no matter how much his last, vexing visitations in “Seymour: An Introduction” and “Hapworth 16, 1924” tried the patience of his most avid followers. I know it’s wishful thinking, but I wonder whether there’s a clue in a little-known, unpublished—at least, not in book form—story that I came on the first time a day after Salinger’s death. A story called “Go See Eddie.”
more from Ron Rosenbaum at Slate here.