Cornflakes and correspondence with jd.salinger

‘We only met once,’ recalls novelist Nils Schou, the author of Salinger’s Letters. ‘It was like meeting Elvis Presley.’

JD Salinger in 1952. Photograph: Getty Images Nils Schou   Saturday 21 November 2015  The Guardian   ---            I wrote to Mr Salinger (never Jerry) from a military base in Greenland in 1962 after reading Franny and Zooey in an aeroplane, a normal fan letter. I wasn’t surprised that he answered; maybe I should have been. We wrote to each other right up to his death, always about Søren Kierkegaard and Isak Dinesen, but latterly also about zen. I met him only once, in a New York hotel restaurant one morning in 1966. He was with a fireman, a friend from the war, eating cornflakes, and even today I eat cornflakes the same way. I gave him some papers from the Kierkegaard Library, but we didn’t talk much. He was very charming and very beautiful. For me it was like meeting Elvis Presley.    More