Flashback, June 1965: Last J. D. Salinger Work Published in His Lifetime

When New Yorker readers received their most recent copy of the magazine 60 years ago this week, they didn’t know they were experiencing something extraordinary: not just a 26,000-word novella by J. D. Salinger that filled 50 pages in that issue, but the last time with a new work by the novelist and short-story writer what would come out in his lifetime.

Considering Salinger’s output for the prior several years, “Hapworth 16, 1924” closed out his career in an appropriate fashion: a letter by Seymour, the eldest son in the Glass family, who had also figured in Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Coming from an upper-class environment, the Glass children grew up privileged, precocious and dysfunctional, a tendency borne out in the 1948 short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which a grown-up Seymour commits suicide.

A post of mine six years ago surveyed most of the course of the enigmatic writer’s career, but I didn’t concentrate on “Hapworth 16, 1924,” or what came after: silence.

If you want to encounter this last published story to date by the author of The Catcher in the Rye, you can’t find it in a collection of his work. You can’t even find it in a New Yorker anthology. Instead, you have to go to the actual physical issue of the magazine (June 21, 1965) online (if you have a subscription to the magazine and its archives) or click this YouTube link to listen to a reading.

In a March 2010 article in New York Magazine, Roger Lathbury discussed how his hopes for publishing this elusive title in book form were briefly fanned before dying.

He had sent a letter to Salinger in 1988 proposing that his tiny company, Orchises Press, issue the novella. After a quick note from the author saying he’d consider it, Lathbury heard nothing more for eight years when, out of the blue, he was contacted by Salinger’s literary agency, Harold Ober Associates. If a book were to be issued, he was told, it needed to be done “to exacting standards”—i.e., bound in buckram.

A cordial meeting at Washington’s National Gallery followed between publisher and novelist, with Lathbury acceding to Salinger’s unusual demands (e.g., limited distribution, the author’s name nowhere on the cover).

Then, the deal came unraveled after Lathbury confirmed to the press that the book would be published. Horrified by what he evidently felt was a betrayal of trust, Salinger withdrew his approval.

Six years ago, Salinger’s son Matt and widow Colleen indicated that they had since 2011 been preparing to release for publication stories written by the legendary New Hampshire recluse in the more than four decades after “Hapworth 16, 1924.” But it was an arduous process, Matt told   of the British publication The Guardian:

“[My father] wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. ... [But] there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: When it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”

Since then, silence—not unlike the sphinx who began it all.