We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work. 

Claire Blechman writes: 

When I lived in New York, I was friends with a girl who worked at Harold Ober Associates, J.D. Salinger’s literary agency. We asked her one night (over Arepas at a tiny restaurant in the Village) what it was like on the inside. She told us the agency received bags and bags of fanmail for Salinger, which languished unopened in the office.  

 There was in fact a specific list of instructions on how to deal with Salinger-related issues. Most were variations on a theme: don’t ask, don’t tell. His address was a state secret: only two people in the whole agency knew it. The only mail he ever received from them was residual checks.

 “J.D. Salinger hates you,” she said. Me, and you, and everyone you know.

 I decided to read Catcher in the Rye my senior year of college. I was lifeguarding with a particularly vacant muscle-head from the lacrosse team who went by his last name: Pearl. I asked Pearl what the last book he read was. “Catcher in the Rye,” he said. It was his absolute favorite, and to my surprise, he expounded upon how much he loved it for a whole minute straight. So I picked it up from the local library, and finished in a couple of days, but I was too late. Five years too late. I “got” it, but I didn’t feel it, not the way Pearl did. Or thousands of other Holdenites, who were in the right place, at the right time.

 Pearl is the perfect representative of a disturbing phenomenon: Catcher in the Rye is the favorite book of people who haven’t read a book since high school. Salinger does adolescence, and he does it extremely well. The problem is—no matter how nostalgic you might be for it—no one is a teenager forever. Catcher in the Rye is the favorite book of people whose experience of literature hasn’t grown with their experience of life.

 To love J.D. Salinger is to love him in stasis. No one had heard or read anything from him in thirty years. Who do you miss? The you from high school, the writer from 1951. The way you felt when a piece of literature and a part of your life so perfectly coincided (perhaps for the last time). Palahniuk got repetitive; Heinlein got preachy. But Salinger perfected the time capsule. Maybe it was a sacrifice, or maybe he was a born exile. Either way, he remained unspoiled by age, or fame, or the demands of an oppressive mountain of fan letters.

 J.D. Salinger lived to be 91. He died at home, the address still safely unknown outside the senior agent’s locked drawer. I know there are plenty of you out there (some of you among my respected friends), claiming that news of his death made you cry. Why? Nothing has changed.

 Mourning Salinger—like worshipping him—is misplaced nostalgia. Like sending fanmail to someone who hates it, to someone who died before you were even born.