Pennsylvania Woman Reveals 10-Year Correspondence with "Jerry" Salinger

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Link to February 28 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, "Jerry and me: A decade of correspondence with J. D. Salinger."

Excerpt: In 1966, when I was a girl of 15 growing up in Central Pennsylvania, I wrote a letter to J.D. "Jerry" Salinger. It began a correspondence and friendship between us that spanned in all about 10 years. In 1970, my junior year in college, I visited him for about five days at his home in New Hampshire.

Until now, I never disclosed my relationship with Jerry Salinger except to family and some close friends. Jerry was distressed by the attention that celebrity thrust upon him, and I respected his desire for privacy. Also, I didn't welcome the attention myself. How and when do you ever so casually mention that you know J.D. Salinger without coming across as a name-dropper eager to impress?

With Jerry's death last month, I feel a little differently. In the words of his character Holden Caulfield, "Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them ..."

C. C. Smith also notes that I grew up in a family of serious card-carrying library patrons with a houseful of books shelved and stacked everywhere. My parents never censored my reading. The first of Jerry's work I read were the co-published novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: an Introduction," which I read aloud in installments over a few weeks to my mother while she took her evening bath. (In my family, just about any setting was conducive to reading.)

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