(From the WSJ.com) Ordinarily, when a great writer dies, it is easy to know what to feel. We are grateful for everything he has given us, and we grieve that he will not be giving us anything more; in time, we start asking the questions, about the nature and quality of his books, that constitute a writer’s real afterlife and the best tribute we can pay him. That is more or less what happened when John Updike died last year, and when Saul Bellow died in 2005.

But when the news came this week of the death of J.D. Salinger, possibly the most beloved and certainly the oddest writer of that postwar generation, it was hard to know how to react. How can you grieve for a writer who has been, for all practical purposes, dead for half a century—one defined by his refusal to publish or even to appear in public? As for gratitude, no writer has earned it more or wanted it less. Since “The Catcher in the Rye” was published, in 1951, millions of teenagers have felt about Salinger the way Holden Caulfield feels about his favorite authors: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author . . . was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

No wonder that, from time to time over the past 60 years, readers took Salinger up on the implied invitation, making the pilgrimage to Cornish, N.H., to meet their imaginary best friend. To the most persistent fans, the very ostentatiousness of Salinger’s privacy—has any writer ever been so well known for refusing to be well known?—must have seemed a kind of flirtation. Surely if you ignored the famous fence and went right up to the hermit’s door, you would prove by your very persistence that you were the reader Salinger was looking for, the one genuine soul in a million “phoneys.” How great the disappointment must have been when it turned out that Salinger really meant his refusals, that he would make no exceptions—not even for Ian Hamilton, the English man of letters whose attempt to write Salinger’s biography embroiled him in a lawsuit that led all the way to the Supreme Court.

Read more here: Salinger’s Long Goodbye: How do you mourn a writer who departed years ago?