A glimpse into Salinger

He ended the letter by asking for her reaction to the first Holden story,which he said was called Slight Rebellion Off Madison,and signing,simply,Jerry S.

The writer was J.D. Salinger,then just 22,with works like The Catcher in the Rye still ahead of him and his literary success hardly assured. When Salinger died in seclusion in 2010,at the age of 91,he remained a mystery,having shared little of himself with the world beyond the few works he had published.

But this elusive author comes vividly to life in a series of letters he wrote from 1941 to 1943. In this correspondence,acquired by the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan and shared with The New York Times,the unsettled young Salinger reveals himself to be as playful,passionate and caustic as Holden Caulfield,the self-questioning adolescent who would become his most enduring creation.

The young Salinger also shows an aptitude for self-mythology and misdirection in these letters,as he obfuscates difficult truths about his personal life,his professional accomplishments and his entrance into World War II. It was a good time for bravado, said Kenneth Slawenski,the author of J.D. Salinger: A Life.

In the summer of 1941,Salinger began exchanging letters with Marjorie Sheard,a Toronto woman about his age,who had been reading his earliest short stories in publications like Esquire and Colliers. An aspiring author herself,Sheard asked Salinger for advice.

Over the next two years,Salinger sent Sheard a total of nine letters,occasionally flirty. What do you look like? he wrote to her on October 9,1941,asking that she send him a large photograph. When Sheard sent along a picture,Salinger replied: Sneaky girl. Youre pretty.

About six years ago,Sheard,now 95,moved to a nursing home and gave the letters to a relative. More recently,as the cost of Sheards care increased,she and her family decided to sell the letters to the Morgan,which collects and displays Salinger correspondence (the museum declined to say how much it paid).

Liza Sheard,a niece of Sheards,said that the letters held a strong sentimental value,particularly because her aunt never became a published writer and lived most of her life as a housewife. Its fantasy-like,because this was not her life at all, Liza Sheard said.

In their earliest,playful exchanges,Salinger says he is rereading Anna Karenina which,he says,is not as good as War and Peace but a far craftier job. (Of Tolstoy,he writes cheekily,I think hell go places.)

In addition to recommending his own stories,he suggests that Sheard read The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon by F Scott Fitzgerald. She replies that both Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway annoy me in the same wayone feels oneself tricked into feeling sympathy for entirely undeserving and rather tiresome people.

But at the start of 1942,Salingers correspondence takes a sardonic turn,and he asks Sheard not to bring up his as-yet-unpublished Holden Caulfield story. God and Harold Ross alone know what that bunch of pixies on the staff are doing with my poor script, he writes,referring to the founding editor of The New Yorker.

But other details that Salinger volunteers about himself at this time are ambiguous,if not fictitious. I was supposed to get married on furlough, he writes in a letter from November 28,1942,but she wanted it all said and done at her Daddys house in Hollywood. So I picked up where I left off with an old typewriter.

Slawenski,the Salinger biographer,said he could not be certain if this was a veiled reference to Salingers relationship with Oona ONeill,the daughter of the playwright Eugene ONeill. Though Salinger and Oona dated briefly,Slawenski said she did not return his affection and went on to marry Charlie Chaplin.

Elsewhere,Salinger mentions that he is trying to forge ahead on his short-story series for The New Yorker. One piece,titled Harry Jesus,comes straight from the belly,he says. It will doubtless tear the countrys heart out, he writes,and return the thing a new and far richer organ.

The possibility that he could succeed on such a scale was apparently too outrageous a dream for the young Salinger. After making this boast,he adds: (Ill probably fail completely with it.)