J.D. Salinger, E-Book Holdout, Joins the Digital Revolution. [View all]

'“The Catcher in the Rye” and other Salinger novels are coming out in digital formats, and the writer’s son plans to release more from his archives.

“I’ve spent my whole life protecting him and not talking about him,” Matt Salinger said of his famously secretive father. But that is changing as he works to keep “The Catcher in the Rye” and other J.D. Salinger works alive in the digital age.

In the five decades since J. D. Salinger published his final short story, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” his small, revered body of work has stayed static, practically suspended in amber.

Even as publishers and consumers adopted e-books and digital audio, Salinger’s books remained defiantly offline, a consequence of the writer’s distaste for computers and technology. And while Salinger kept writing until his death nearly 10 years ago, not a word has been published since 1965.

That is partly because of his son, Matt Salinger, who helps run the J. D. Salinger Literary Trust and is a vigilant guardian of his father’s legacy and privacy.

But now, in an effort to keep his father’s books in front of a new generation of readers, the younger Mr. Salinger is beginning to ease up, gradually lifting a cloud of secrecy that has obscured the life and work of one of America’s most influential and enigmatic writers.

This week, in the first step of a broader revival that could reshape the world’s understanding of Salinger and his writing, Little, Brown is publishing digital editions of his four books, making him perhaps the last 20th-century literary icon to surrender to the digital revolution.

Then this fall, with Mr. Salinger’s help, the New York Public Library will host the first public exhibition from Salinger’s personal archives, which will feature letters, family photographs and the typescript for “The Catcher in the Rye” with the author’s handwritten edits, along with about 160 other items.

And before long, decades worth of Salinger’s unpublished writing will be released, a project Mr. Salinger estimated will take another five to seven years to complete.

Combing through his father’s manuscripts and letters has been both enlightening and emotionally taxing, Mr. Salinger said in an interview to promote the new digital editions. . .

He doesn’t want to inflate expectations for Salinger fans by describing the contents, beyond confirming that his father did continue to write about the Glass family — the precocious cosmopolitans who feature in beloved stories like “Franny and Zooey” and “Seymour—An Introduction” — among other subjects.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/books/jd-salinger-ebooks.html?