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Salinger also expounded on how he regarded his past work, explaining that he was particularly protective of it but disposed to see many of his early stories wither away. He considered them to be his personal belongings, much like socks in a drawer. “Some stories, my property, have been stolen,” he explained. “Someone’s appropriated them. It’s an illicit act. It’s unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That’s how I feel.”

Salinger, of course, did not contact Fosburgh to inform the world about what he had been doing since 1965 or to share his feelings about publishing or stolen clothes. He called to threaten the creators of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories with litigation in the hope of avoiding a trial. Fosburgh’s article appeared on the front page of The New York Times on November 3. In it, she faithfully reported that Salinger had filed a civil suit in Federal District Court against “John Greenberg,” a pseudonym for the illicit publishers, as well as against seventeen major bookstores that had dared to sell the collection. Charging Greenberg with the copyright violation, Salinger said that he was seeking $250,000 in damages and made special note that bookstores could be fined from $4,500 to $9,000 for each copy they sold. “It’s really very irritating,” Salinger confided. “I’m very upset about it.”

As in many of Salinger’s previous interviews and commentaries, the Times article contained a small measure of insincerity. Ignoring his years-old intention to publish the Young Folks anthology (an affair of which Fosburgh and readers had no knowledge), Salinger claimed that he had never intended for his early stories to appear in book form. “I wrote them a long time ago,” he stated, “and I never had any intention of publishing them. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death. I’m not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth. I just don’t think they’re worthy of publishing.”10

The Times article had the immediate effect that Salinger was seeking. A court injunction forbade the distribution and sale of the pirated collection. Publication stopped, the mysterious “John Greenberg” disappeared, and the lawsuit was dropped. The whole incident gave an impression of Salinger as self-absorbed and perhaps spiteful. It opened a debate on whether a work of literature, regardless of how it was perceived by the author, could ethically be taken back from the eyes of readers after having once been published.

The unauthorized story collection was far from Salinger’s major concern in 1974. That year, he suffered the loss of both parents. In March, Solomon Salinger died, followed by Miriam three months later.

• • •

On December 8, 1980, a tragedy occurred that would forever stigmatize The Catcher in the Rye and for years associate Salinger fans with dangerous emotional instability.

John Lennon, formerly of the Beatles, his wife, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean, were living in the Dakota, an exclusive apartment building looming over Central Park West. On the evening of December 8, as they entered the Dakota, a deranged twenty-five-year-old, Mark David Chapman, fired four hollow-pointed bullets into Lennon at close range, killing him. The assassin then calmly sat down on the sidewalk, pulled from his pocket a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, and began to read as if nothing had happened.

The world was stunned. An entire generation had intimately associated itself with Lennon, and his senseless death felt like a personal violation. As details of the assassination emerged, it became clear that Chapman would plead insanity. He claimed that a voice in his head had compelled him to kill Lennon. But his foremost defense was far better crafted and would have a chilling impact upon Salinger fans worldwide: he blamed his crime on The Catcher in the Rye.

Chapman had traveled to New York from Hawaii to commit the murder. Once in the city, he had sought out a bookstore and purchased a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. He had read the novel many times before and had convinced