Read J.D. Salinger’s first short story to feature Holden Caufield

Not only is this just a very indirect link to a medium post but the amount of underline text used on said post is so overwhelming as to make the whole mess unreadable, not to mention Medium is apparently incapable of actually loading text in a reasonable render time. A plain .txt would have sufficed and yet here we are.

Here is a plain text copy that, that will render immediately and save you a mess of cookie popups, underlines and other nonsense: https://rentry.co/nviqt

edit: changed pastebin for something less spammy because even a freakin' pastebin wants you to register now

As an undergrad, I was a bit of a Salinger obsessive. I tracked down all the published and uncollected short stories from “The Young Folks” to “Hapworth 16.” I've read them all except, oddly enough, for “This Sandwich Has No Mayonaise” which is the only one that I have not in a photocopy, but rather in a collection entitled The Armchair Esquire. Perhaps when I get back into my re-reading Salinger project I'll finally get to that book and story.

There's been talk since Salinger's death of the post-Hapworth stuff being published at some point, but it's been more than a decade and still nothing so maybe it will never happen.

I was only just saying to a relative that Catcher in the Rye has been made obsolete by LiveJournal.

Reading this in contrast to the “anti-mimetic” article posted recently is great. It highlights a kind of price you can pay for a lack of acquiescence to established norms. Nothing terribly dramatic, just a kind of indifference reflected back at you.