J.D. Salinger at 90

Tomorrow, New Year's Day 2009, J.D. Salinger is 90 (next term, The Catcher in the Rye will be the main text being studied by our Transition Year). In today's New York Times, Charles McGrath writes about the famously reclusive writer:-

There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up.

In the rest of the article, McGrath looks back over Salinger's 'career', especially the Glass family stories, including the strange letter called 'Hapworth'.