Not even deceased novelists are exempt from the scourge of online piracy. Famed author JD Salinger, whose sole published novel Catcher In The Rye you would have found either eye-opening and influential or boring and totally lame, depending on your archetype in high school (lit-nerds loved it, football captains not so much), has had three short stories surreptitiously scanned and posted on a file-sharing website this week.
The stories The Ocean Full Of Bowling Balls, Paula and Birthday were collected together and titled Three Stories (pirates are nothing if not concise), and were previously only able to be read by scholars under supervision at Princeton University Library and the University of Texas.
BBC News reports that “The Ocean Full Of Bowling Balls is a prequel to the story of its idealistic outcast, Holden Caulfield, and recounts the death of his younger brother Kenneth – renamed Allie in the subsequent novel”.
After the success of Catcher In The Rye, Salinger withdrew from the public eye and became reclusive, refusing to publish any new work after 1965, and reportedly giving instructions that his unpublished stories were to remain unpublished for 50 years after his death in 2010. The anonymous internet user who uploaded the works to the what.cd file sharing website wrote “It took me many weeks of research to find that this book existed, and many more weeks to acquire it.”
I dunno, illegally downloading a scanned version of a manuscript that was never meant for publication – something about it seems so… what’s the word? Phony.
Via BBC News
