“Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
In 1955 he married a young student, Claire Douglas, and they had two children, Margaret and Matt. In Margaret’s memoirs The Dream Catcher she reflects on an often painful childhood, describing her father as an autocratic man who kept her mother as a “virtual prisoner.”
They divorced in 1967, and in 1972 Salinger began a year-long relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, with whom he had been exchanging letters.
In a sign of the lingering interest in Salinger, some letters he wrote to Maynard sold for more than US$150,000 at auction in 1999.
Salinger has remained to this day in his Cornish home, and has been married to Collen O’Neill since the 1980s. He has fiercely guarded his privacy, even turning to the courts to stop publication of his letters. And he has refused all offers to sell the screen rights to Catcher.
“There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It’s all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time,” he told the Boston Globe.
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