Unsealed Letters Offer Glimpse of Salinger
By Alison Leigh Cowan
Published, New York Times: February 11, 2010

The letters, a total of 11, were written between 1951 and 1993, from one buddy, or “Buddyroo,” to another. In sharp and familiar prose, laced with humor and biting wit, the writer gives an intimate peek into his life and thoughts at precise moments in time. Read so many years later, they are filled with surprises.

Left - Photo by Robert Stolarik for The New York Times shows
Salinger’s letters to the friend who designed the book jacket of “Catcher in the Rye” .

The recipient of the letters was E. Michael Mitchell, a Westport, Conn., commercial artist who had designed the book jacket for a best-selling novel.

The author of the letters — and that novel — was J. D. Salinger.

Now, two weeks after Mr. Salinger’s death at age 91, the letters are being made public. They are likely to be among the first batch of many such correspondences, given Mr. Salinger’s history of letter-writing, that will surface and deepen — or perhaps even alter — the public’s understanding of one of the 20th-century’s most puzzling, and puzzled about, literary lights.

The letters furnish what may be the most specific description yet of Mr. Salinger’s writing habits in the years after 1965, when he stopped publishing. Even in the 1980s, he describes a highly disciplined writing regimen, starting each morning at 6, never later than 7, and not brooking interruption, “unless absolutely necessary or convenient.” This in-his-own-words account may bolster the conviction and hope of some that he left additional works behind.

The letters to Mr. Mitchell also capture, like Polaroid snapshots, how Mr. Salinger initially embraced the high life he tasted as an up-and-coming author — supping with Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh in the couple’s London home, for instance — before souring on the social scene and parts of New York that helped shape his fiction.

Trips to New York to meet friends, wolf down Chinese food, browse bookstores or take in shows, became rarer over the years, according to the letters, though Mr. Salinger acknowledged still getting a kick out of the subway into his ’60s.
Read more at NYT.