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Billings Learned Hand is widely regarded as having been the most important judge in American history never to sit upon the highest court. He was often called “the tenth justice of the Supreme Court” in recognition of his impact upon American law. A 1944 speech on the nature of liberty delivered by Hand was so thoughtful and eloquent that it catapulted him to instant fame and is still required study in law schools throughout the nation. During his fifty-two years on the federal bench, Judge Hand forged a reputation as a champion of individual liberties and a fierce protector of the freedom of speech.

Aside from similarities of conviction, Judge Hand and Salinger shared personal traits that bonded them together. Hand was himself an author, whose works remain as important to constitutional law as Salinger’s works are to fiction. Both men valued their right to privacy and were wary of those who might twist their words to serve purposes not intended. Both were intensely fascinated by religion and enjoyed conversations on spiritual topics that often consumed hours. Sadly, both men were enmeshed in troubled marriages, a fact that both painstakingly concealed from others. Perhaps most important, both Salinger and Learned Hand suffered from periods of deep depression, a penchant toward melancholy that fused them together in a way unique to such sufferers. During the final years of Learned Hand’s life, his relationship with Salinger was perhaps the fullest he enjoyed, while Salinger’s gratitude for their friendship was unmistakable. His letters to Hand were frequent. In them, he confided his inability to deal with Claire’s loneliness and feelings of isolation. It was to Hand that Salinger first announced the birth of his daughter. It was Hand whom Salinger chose to be Peggy’s godfather.

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On March 1, 1956, Salinger’s longtime editor, Gus Lobrano, died of cancer at age fifty-three. Lobrano’s death came as a shock to the New Yorker family. “He was such a nice man,” Salinger mourned, “I can’t begin to tell you … I miss him tremendously.”8 For all their professional disagreements, Salinger and Lobrano had worked well together. Their relationship had spanned a decade. Gus Lobrano had also been a physical link to the memory of Harold Ross who had taught Lobrano a rare respect for writers, which was vital when dealing with Salinger.

As head fiction editor, Lobrano had held a powerful position at The New Yorker, and his death created a void that invited chaos and was potentially lethal to Salinger’s relationship with the magazine. In Lobrano’s sudden absence, hopeful candidates scurried to fill the vacancy. Foremost among them was Katharine White, whom Lobrano had himself succeeded back in 1938. Having since returned to The New Yorker, the Whites were now anxious to reassert their influence. That J. D. Salinger would find a viable replacement for Gus Lobrano among this clash of egos was improbable.

The struggle within the editorial offices of The New Yorker indeed claimed victims. Salinger’s friend S. J. Perelman suspended his association with the magazine in disgust over the ensuing frenzy. Perelman had been close to Lobrano and bewildered at the succession of Shawn to replace Ross. Watching the jockeying of positions in the shadow of Lobrano’s death, he was amazed and appalled. Even the magazine’s contributors seemed drawn into the bedlam, “acting,” as he put it, “as though they invented the paper.” On one occasion Perelman actually came to blows with the cartoonist James Thurber. “Thurber was going on ad nauseam about his influence and how he’d set the style for the whole enterprise, etc. I finally got a snootful and said mildly, ‘Come, come, it’s just another 15-cent magazine.’ Though nearly blind, he leapt at me and tried to throttle me. It took two burly copy editors to drag him off me.”9

When the Byzantine intrigue at The New Yorker finally subsided, it was Katharine White who slipped into Lobrano’s position. She and her husband were now viewed as something of