Improve Conditions

I'll say it: I'm glad to hear that J.D. Salinger has died, because I read this book many years ago and it put me under the impression that Salinger has a vault with several manuscripts in it, which are to be published posthumously. I'm more happy re: the prospect of the books than I am sad that a 91 year old man who lived an exceptionally fruitful life has gone to his eternal reward. (Yes, I know the books will probably be unreadable. I vividly remember cutting class one day in high school to go up to the New York Public and lay hands on an old number of the New Yorker with his last uncollected story in it, sitting there as if I had laid hands on Rimbaud's lost notebook, reading it with clean hands and patience, and thinking, with five thousand words down and twenty thousand more to go, 'What the fuck is this shit,' a sentiment that just grew stronger the more I read. But one can hope.) Anyway, raise a pint to the great man some time—if you were like most sensitive young people you may have outgrown him years ago, but before you did he meant something to you in a way much better writers never, ever will.