A New Exhibition Offers a Rare Glimpse Into Reclusive Author JD’s Salinger’s Life—See Highlights Here

The life and work of JD Salinger is the subject of an exhibition
opening this week at the New York Public Library on what would have
been the reclusive author’s 100th birthday.

More than 200 objects, including manuscripts and photos on
loan from the JD Salinger Literary Trust, will be going on public
view for the first time, at the very same library that Salinger
visited as a boy. It is curated by the author’s son, Matt
Salinger, as well as Colleen Salinger, the author’s widow, and
Declan Kiely, the library’s director of special collections and
exhibitions.

“When my father’s long-time publisher, Little, Brown and
Company, first approached me with plans for his centennial year, my
immediate reaction was that he would not like the attention,” said
Matt Salinger in a statement. “He was a
famously private man who shared his work with millions, but his
life and non-published thoughts with less than a handful of people,
including me.”

But the author’s son changed his mind in time for the centenary.
“While I’ve long respected and honored (and zealously protected)
his privacy, I also have come to see the value in sharing a direct
and uninterpreted glimpse of his life with those readers who want
it,” Matt Salinger said, noting that he hopes the show will
encourage audiences to discover JD Salinger works
beyond The Catcher in the Rye.

The author’s most famous book, published serially in 1945 and
’46 before becoming a novel in 1951, will nonetheless be in
evidence at the show. The Catcher in the Rye‘s original
typescript, showing Salinger’s changes, and the revised galley
proofs, will be on view, as well as one of his two typewriters.

On the personal side, there will be photographs of Salinger from
his childhood, his job as a Caribbean cruise ship
entertainment director, and his time serving in the Army during
World War II. Also on view will be Salinger’s handwritten recipes,
his passport, his honorable discharge papers from the service, and
letters to and from friends and professional contacts,
including fellow author Ernest Hemingway.

There’s one 1982 legal document in which Salinger described
himself thusly:

I am a professional short-story writer and novelist. I write
fiction and only fiction. For more than thirty years, I have lived
and done my work in rural New Hampshire. I was married here and my
two children were raised here. . . . I have been writing fiction
rather passionately, singlemindedly, perhaps insatiably, since I
was fifteen or so . . . I positively rejoice to imagine that,
sooner or later, the finished product safely goes to the ideal
private reader, alive or dead or yet unborn, male or female or
possibly neither.

“This exhibition presents Salinger in his own words,” Kiely said
in a statement. “It provides fresh insight into his writing
process, his views on the design and appearance of his books, his
network of friendships with school and army buddies—some spanning
over half a century—as well as with fellow authors and New
Yorker magazine editors.”

“This exhibition allows us to see Salinger from childhood to old
age, revealing many facets of the writer: friend, father,
grandparent, soldier, correspondent, spiritual seeker and,
importantly, avid and eclectic reader,” Kiely added.

See more photos from the exhibition below.

“JD Salinger” will be on
view at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman
Building, 476 Fifth Avenue, New York, October 18, 2019–January 19,
2020.

The post A New Exhibition Offers a Rare Glimpse Into
Reclusive Author JD’s Salinger’s Life—See Highlights Here
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