Gone, at age 91, American fiction’s most famous recluse.  Rumor has it that he has at least two novels in a safe in his house, and shelves lined with notebooks of unpublished material about the Glass family.  Read more. . .

For many people, reading The Catcher in the Rye was a pivotal experience of adolescence–one they never forgot.  I confess I came to the book too early, before I could understand it, and read it on my own, without the help of a teacher and a class.  But the power of the emotion, and the despair, stuck with me, as did the picture of the upper-class NY private school society–an exotic world in my eyes.

What was your experience reading The Catcher in the Rye? Do you think seeing Salinger’s unpublished works be a good thing–or should his privacy be respected?