LACEY FOSBURGH: What prompted Mr. Salinger to speak . . . was what he regards as the latest and most severe of all invasions of his private world: the publication of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vols. 1 and 2. During the last two months, about 25,000 copies of these books, priced at $3 to $5 for each volume, have been sold—first here in San Francisco, then in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, according to Mr. Salinger, his lawyers and book dealers around the country.

SAN FRANCISCO BOOK DEALER: They’re selling like hotcakes. Everybody wants one.

LACEY FOSBURGH: Since last April, copies of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vols. 1 and 2, have reportedly been peddled in person to bookstores . . . by men who always call themselves John Greenberg and say they come from Berkeley, California. Their descriptions have varied from city to city.

PAUL ALEXANDER: For Salinger fans, the most important thing Salinger told Fosburgh was that he continued to write on a daily basis. I think that was the whole point of the phone call. He was annoyed and angry with the pirated editions, but a lawsuit was taking care of that. He wanted the public to know that he was still writing and what he was not doing was publishing. In 1970 J. D. Salinger paid back—with interest—Little, Brown the $75,000 advance it had given him for his next book. Salinger was willing to draw that distinction between writing and publishing; he had been drawing that distinction since 1965. This was the first interview that Salinger had granted since 1953. He painted a self-portrait of someone who was still completely devoted to his craft.

J. D. SALINGER (quoted in the New York Times, November 3, 1974):

I’m not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth. I just don’t think they’re worthy of publication. I wrote them a long time ago and I never had any intention of publishing them [in a book]. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death. Some stories, my property, have been stolen. It’s an illicit act. Suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it—that’s how I feel. It’s amazing some law-and-order agency can’t do something about this. I’m just trying to protect what privacy I have left.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work. I’ve survived a lot of things and I’ll probably survive this.

PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger had made a habit of telling the world that he was a recluse. But if he were really a recluse, he wouldn’t have picked up the phone and called a reporter from the New York Times. He’d say he was a recluse, but his actions were those of someone who was very clearly manipulating the subject of his reclusiveness. He’d sold millions and millions of books. He was an extremely sophisticated man. He knew exactly what he was doing.

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RICHARD STAYTON: In the early ’70s, I was living in San Francisco and heard there was a new work by J. D. Salinger out. You could always find books at the secondhand bookstores in Berkeley, so I went over to Berkeley and on Telegraph Avenue found these two volumes, two slim paperbacks. I didn’t have a lot of money in those days, so I just bought volume one. I took it home and was very excited to find all these early Salinger stories, including ones with Holden Caulfield, pre–Catcher in the Rye. When I went back to buy the second volume, not only were both volumes gone, but the store owners declined to admit they’d ever sold the first volume, which was absolutely baffling to me. I went to several secondhand bookstores: nobody had ever heard of the book. I’d lost my mind, evidently. I found an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that explained why I’d never be able to buy volume two of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger: “A collection of early short stories by J. D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, was once widely available in San Francisco, but has largely disappeared, local bookstore proprietors said today.” I didn’t want to violate J. D. Salinger’s beliefs, but I certainly wanted volume two, and I’ve never found it.

MARK HOWLAND: In the 1970s I walked into a bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, called Ephram’s. It’s a great place, about three stories, lots of cobwebs, dust, catacombs, floor-to-ceiling stacks—some new books but mostly used. I remember walking down from the street level to the basement. There were books stacked right along the stairwell and I saw three copies of the two-volume Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger. Immediately I knew what they were and couldn’t believe I was standing in front of a gold mine. I went to the owner of the store and said, “Where did you get these?” He said, “I was in a café in Paris and a traveling book salesman with a briefcase came by, sat down at the table, and pulled these out.” He told me he bought them for a dollar apiece, and I bought them for three dollars apiece from him. One of the big regrets of my life is that I didn’t get all three. I got just one of each.