Beschreibung:

Letters to a young writer J.D. Salinger, 1950s SALINGER, J.D. (1919-2010). A group of ten letters, comprising one autograph and five typed letters signed ("Jerry," "J," and "J.D. Salinger"), together with four typed letters signed in type ("Whitey," "JDS," and "J.D. Salinger"), to Rose-Ellen Currie, Windsor, Vermont, 1953-1958. Together 14 pages, various sizes 215 x 280mm to 187 x 272mm (paper stock a little browned in some cases, with slight wear at extremities); seven letters include their transmittal envelopes. With two outgoing drafts from Rose-Ellen Currie, 11 and 13 April 1953, together with typed draft fragments, six pages. "I'll bet you anything I had more rejection slips (slips, not letters) from the New Yorker before I was eighteen than you've had to date. Funnier still, the magazine bought my first story in 1941 and didn't get around to publishing it till 1946." —22 June 1958 A group of unpublished letters from Salinger to a young writer, full of heartfelt advice on her work together with candid discussions of his own. Here Salinger touches on both Nine Stories (1953) and his story "Franny." Regarding Nine Stories , he reports on 14 July c.1952, "The book's still going. I may call it Nine Novels , if I get it done in this incarnation." In March 1954, on an unnamed project: "I am up to my flat, slug-white, writer's ass in a large-size book, which is giving me the usual amount of trouble […] I'm just working and working, and a lot of it is beginning to shape up, and a lot isn't." Following the 1955 publication of "Franny" in the New Yorker he thanks her for her "bolstering word" on the story and writes gratefully: "The magazine mail on it has been voluminous and terrible. You and you only would be counted on not to ask if Teddy were pregnant and whether Holden Caulfield pushed Franny into the swimming pool" (March 1955). "Franny" would appear in book form in Franny and Zooey in 1961. The letters are also rich in biographical detail, touching on getting married, having a child on the way, and his Vermont home (in November 1955: "Claire is joyful and beautifully protuberant – our baby is due within the next two weeks – and I'm at work every day in my new and very cosy little work house"; in July 1952: "I started to build a stone wall around the house, thinking it might be becoming to my style of neurosis, but lost interest in the project very quickly…"). Salinger helps young Rose-Ellen deal with creative rejection as she tries to see her work published, and provides a wealth of encouragement. He writes that one editor in particular "irritates the hell out of me," and calls him "a pustule-abroad type I know so well." He admonishes, "If you take seriously anything he has to say, you may as well go bury yourself in a grave of old Harper's Bazaars ." "Both stories reek of talent. I promise you I wouldn't say that to you if I didn't mean it." The correspondence draws to a close following the publication of Currie's story "Tibs Eve" in the pages of the 5 April 1958 issue of the New Yorker . Salinger writes in a three-page missive on 22 June the same year: "You're now such a committed writer, and I've made a big, big effort most of my professional life to stay away from your brother and sister writers. I hope you have an idea how lucky you are I feel this way."