The Salinger Dilemma

How do you put a price on the sound of an author’s voice?

- Brin-Jonathan Butler

On June 13, 1980, Betty Eppes got the interview of a lifetime. The 40-year-old reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate had just completed treatment for breast cancer and returned to the newsroom determined to do “something that I thought was significant,” she told me from her current home in Pearl, Miss.

So she talked to her editor and made a list of the people she believed to be the most difficult in the world to interview: Ugandan President Idi Amin, Thomas Pynchon, and J.D. Salinger. She quickly landed on The Catcher in the Rye author, who hadn’t published anything since 1965 and had given his last interview in 1953.

Eppes flew to Boston, rented a sky-blue Pinto, and drove into the Green Mountains in search of the recluse at his home in Cornish, N.H. She got his phone number from a local grocer and then, on the recommendation of Salinger’s housekeeper, gave a note to the clerk at the Windsor post office where he received his mail.