"Here's where the similarities to the recent contretemps over Vladimir Nabokov's last unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura, occurred to me. (Refresher course: Laura was a draft of a novel that existed only as 138 handwritten index cards—Nabokov's method of initial composition. Before his death, he asked that they be burned. His wife failed to do so, and the decision has come down to his son Dmitri, who, after much agonizing, decided that his father would now want him to contravene his wishes and cash in by permitting publication. The draft is scheduled to be published, with much fanfare, this fall.)"

"The similarities between the Salinger and Nabokov cases have to do with the disposition of the final works of two of the most distinctive writers of our time. Conflicting accounts have emerged of what Salinger's been doing in the years since the 1965 publication of his last story in The New Yorker, "Hapworth 16, 1924." Since then, he's been holed up in a hilltop house in New Hampshire, and I've heard unofficial reports that he's produced several novels whose manuscripts—like Laura's—have been stashed in a bank's safe-deposit vault. Or that there are manuscript pages stacked to the ceiling in his house but no certainty about their state of completion."

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