Answering J.D. Salinger's Mail

Someone had to do it. That someone was Joanna Smith Rakoff. She relays her experiences about it on Slate.

From the piece...

My naiveté didn't last long at Ober. Every day, a bundle of mail was dropped on my desk by the office secretary, much of which consisted of letters addressed to Salinger. The letters came from Sri Lanka or the Netherlands or Arizona. They included deeply personal admissions—cancer diagnoses, bankruptcy, divorce—and were often written in Salinger's own brash style or, at the very least, incorporated the slang of the period he chronicled. "Dear Jerry, you old bastard," they tended to start. "I gotta tell you. The Catcher in the Rye is one helluva goddamn book."

Some of these letter writers wanted something specific from Salinger—his permission to make a film version of one story or another, often—but most simply wanted a letter back from him. For the most part, they knew that Salinger didn't read his fan mail—in fact, he'd insisted that nothing, not one letter, be passed on to him—but each was convinced that his letter was going to be the one that was so moving, so brilliant, so funny, so perfectly aligned with Salinger's interests and sensibilities, that we, at Ober, would pass it on to him. And that Salinger would then, of course, recognize the writer—the teenage girl from Japan, the World War II veteran in Kansas—as a kindred spirit and write back. Though the authors of these letters varied in age and nationality, there was a theme common to nearly all the letters: Salinger was the only person who understood them.