Open the vaults: Unpublished Salinger work to be released

One of the book world's greatest mysteries is finally ending: J D Salinger's son says previously unpublished work by his late father will be coming out.

In comments that appeared Friday in The Guardian, Matt Salinger confirmed longstanding reports that the author of "The Catcher in the Rye" had continued to write decades after he stopped publishing books. He said that he and Salinger's widow, Colleen, are "going as fast as we freaking can" to prepare the material for release.

"He wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time," Salinger said of his father, who died in 2010 and had not published work since the mid-1960s.

"This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that's a lot of material. So there's not a reluctance or a protectiveness: When it's ready, we're going to share it," he said.

Salinger, who helps oversee his father's literary estate, says any new work might be years away and did not cite any specific titles or plots. He did indicate that the Glass family made famous in such fiction as "Franny and Zooey" would be seen again.

"I feel the pressure to get this done, more than he did," he said, adding that the unseen work "will definitely disappoint people that he wouldn't care about, but for real readers . I think it will be tremendously well received by those people and they will be affected in the way every reader hopes to be affected when they open a book. Not changed, necessarily, but something rubs off that can lead to change." Longtime Salinger publisher Little, Brown and Company had no comment Friday.

J D Salinger published just four books in his lifetime: "Nine Stories," ''The Catcher in the Rye," ''Franny and Zooey" and a volume with the two novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction."
Salerno wrote in an email Friday to The Associated Press that "it was always his (JD Salinger's) intention and specific direction to have his work published after his death."