Salinger's Unsullied Memory

In an understated tribute to J.D. Salinger, Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, points out that the public has no memories of the famed writer. Aside from his work, Allen writes, "We have no cranky anecdotes about thrown drinks, no second cousins who once stood next to him at a roulette table, no paparazzi pictures of him with his long face and solemn eyes staring with predatory kindness at some starlet in Malibu." Salinger was a different kind of literary hero. Unlike Hemingway or Fitzgerald, he wasn't a public figure, just a private man who happened to be famous, and whose mystique relied solely on his writing. Allen points out that while Hemingway made unhappiness beautiful, Salinger made it a virtue, that Salinger praised authenticity above all in his writing, and that it's entirely possible for Salinger will become America's Proust, if the alleged manuscripts Salinger is said to have locked in his safe are discovered and published.