I first want to say that I think this is a very sad week for American letters. Howard Zinn was the embodiment of the term “living legend,” and his effect on how we see and teach history is immeasurable. And the man worked till the very end, it seems. He’d just done work at Mission High School here in San Francisco last year. He was an astonishing guy; it’s hard to think of what the landscape would look like without him.

To lose Salinger the same week is odd, given that his work and life serves as an interesting counterpoint. If Zinn was the archetypal engagé writer-historian-activist, Salinger was his opposite. And for decades I’ve wondered what exactly happened to Salinger to drive him away from publishing and people, from much of an active participation in the world. Clearly he was wounded by the attention he received, and I’ve always wondered exactly what the breaking point was.

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” the average number of times for a young person my age—which is to say, every few years between when I was sixteen and twenty-six or so. When I was about twenty I read the rest of the books and stories, and when I began to teach, about ten years ago, I usually included a Salinger story in every syllabus, usually demonstrating the use of dialogue to illuminate character. His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical; it’s really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.

I like to think that had he continued to write and publish, he would have continued to evolve in bold new ways. The man was an artist, no doubt about it, and his work was always growing in new—darker, stranger, more wonderfully obsessive—directions. And always, no matter where the stories go (or don’t go), his sentences are so beautiful, and so unlike anyone else’s. A few years back, when he backed out of the publishing of “Hapworth,” I wanted so badly to write to him, to say that we’d publish that and anything else he saw fit, and that we’d do it in whatever quiet and respectful way he sought. It’s clear he wasn’t so crazy about the splashy aspects of publishing on a certain scale, and I can identify with that—with the desire to just have the book look like you want it to, on the scale you feel comfortable with. But I don’t think he ever could strike that balance between the public and private worlds of writing and publishing his work.

To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.

My own pet theory is that he dabbled with stories for many years, maybe finished a handful, but as the distance from his last published work grew longer, it became more difficult to imagine any one work being the follow-up; the pressure on any story or novel would be too great. And thus the dabbling might have continued, but the likelihood of his finishing something, particularly a novel, became more remote. And so I think we might find fragments of things, much in the way “The Original of Laura” was found. But there’s something about the prospect of actually publishing one’s work that brings that work into focus. That pressure is needed, just like it’s needed to make diamonds from raw carbon.

Of course, the possibility most intriguing—and fictional-sounding—would have Salinger having continued to write for fifty years, finishing hundreds of stories and a handful of novels, all of which are polished and up to his standards and ready to go, and all of which he imagined would be found and published after his death. That, in fact, he intended all along for these works to be read, but that he just couldn’t bear to send them into the world while he lived.

I guess we’ll see.

I picked up “The Catcher in the Rye” at the library when I was ten years old, thinking it was a baseball book, and was very quickly and utterly confused and dismayed. I wonder if it somehow scarred me, and perhaps countless other unwitting boys expecting a sanguine, inspiring tale. Later, when I was fifteen and suddenly landed in the exotic, alien world of boarding school, I finally read it and then immediately dove next into “Franny and Zooey” and “Nine Stories,” awed by these youthful characters who were so dazzlingly articulate and achingly wise. But what struck me most was how wounded they were—if you could be wounded, exquisitely—with what seemed all the thorny emotion of life, of the world. I hadn’t quite understood life to be like that, until Salinger. And I realized then that I had grown up a little.

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, “The Surrendered,” is due out in March.

I feel as though my father has died.

There are biological parents and adoptive parents, and then there are appropriated parents— artistic or intellectual parents—as instrumental in your development as any other parent or more so because they are selected by you. It is in that vein that I tell you: J. D. Salinger was my father—apologies to his biological offspring and my own multiple parents.

Like any parental relationship, one can’t exactly remember becoming aware of the parent as a someone other than a parent—i.e. the notion of Salinger as not just my father, but a writer, not just a writer but a hero, not just a hero but an icon, not just an icon but a complicated case—talk about the anxiety of influence, this is literally about how one writer makes another.

And like any coming to consciousness, it happened in bits and pieces, fragments. I don’t know when I first read “A Perfect Day For Banana Fish,” but I remember when it started to make sense. It began in the nineteen-seventies, with a conflation of Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin in “The Graduate” and Seymour Glass—two lost young men, poolside. Added to the mix is Hoffman again as Carl Bernstein in “All the Presidents Men”—the real-world events of my hometown, Washington, D.C., Vietnam, and Watergate were the backdrop to my emerging consciousness—scenes from the movie were filmed near my junior high school, and I played hooky to stand around and snap Polariods of the actors, like a wannabe Warhol. The process of transforming fact into fiction, reporters into movie stars, is part of the warp that became my experience.

The proceedings of book clubs in the city and beyond.

THE CLUB: Founded in 1980. The members met while waitressing at Julia's 14 Carrot Cafe, in Seattle. When one of the members was in college, she cleaned house for a woman who was in a book club, which inspired her to start her own. Though additional members have drifted in and out of the club, the original five remain.

THE MEMBERS: Phyllis Levy, Anne Reid, Jane Lotter, Amy Hines, and Linda Shaw, all in their fifties or sixties. Two work in technology, the other two in health, and one is an aspiring novelist.

THE SETTING: The club rotates among members’ houses in Seattle.

THE MENU: In honor of The Book Bench, the dishes at this meeting were all New York-themed: bagels and black-and-white cookies. And of course, no meeting is complete without beer, wine, and sparkling water.

NO BOYS ALLOWED: “The funny thing is that in the early years we were very serious to the point of asking spouses or live-in partners to leave the house so as not to be a distraction. You can imagine how much we got teased about this. As we had children we could no longer send everyone away.”

THE BOOK: Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth.”

THE VERDICT: Recommended.

WHY? “There were many interesting characters and relationships to discuss. Plus it is just a great read.”

FAVORITE BOOK SO FAR: This is a difficult decision, because the club has been in session since 1980, and the women have over two hundred books to choose from. Standouts from their long and diverse reading list include Richard Ford’s “The Sportswriter,” Paul Bowles’s “The Sheltering Sky,” the Dali Llama’s “Freedom in Exile,” and Tobias Wolff’s “Back in the World.”

LEAST FAVORITE: Steven Millhauser’s “Martin Dressler: An American Tale” and Bob Smith’s “Hamlet’s Dresser.” Not to mention the numerous books that they’ve actually forgotten: “There are many on the list that I don’t remember which says something about my enjoyment of the book.”

DO THEY ACTUALLY DISCUSS THE BOOK? “When we started we would only discuss the book and never any personal topics. As the years went by and we saw each other less often, we did away with this rule and now I would say we spend about fifty per cent of the time catching up, thirty on discussing the selection, and twenty choosing the next book.”

WHAT BEING IN A BOOK CLUB MEANS TO THEM: “I love to read and talk about books and listen to others interpretations and opinions but book club is so much more than this. These women are some of my oldest and dearest friends and book club keeps us connected. It’s been a constant in our lives as other things have changed. We have shared our lives, both the happy times (weddings, babies, bnai mitzvahs, graduations) and the sad (miscarriages, divorce, heart attacks, death of loved ones), and have been there for each other for support and love. This is a very important part of my life and I can’t imagine not having it.”

Would you like to see your club covered in Book-Club Confidential? E-mail us!

Last night in Philadelphia, my friends and I were having dinner at Radicchio, a restaurant on the border of Old City and Northern Liberty, discussing the sudden news of J.D. Salinger’s death. We talked about “The Catcher in the Rye” and wondered what book, if any, coming in its wake, had been as galvanizing, controversial, wildly popular, and accomplished. “Iconic” was the word. “Catch-22”? “Portnoy’s Complaint”? Perhaps, maybe—but in the last twenty or thirty years? Any book of real literary chops that everyone had read the way everyone read “Catcher,” as everyone still reads “Catcher”? We agreed there probably wasn’t, and wondered further, Was that a failing of book writers, or a further sign of the faltering literary temple? The three of us being book writers, we preferred to blame anything but the book writers: the withering audience for serious novels, the dissipation of a centralized critical apparatus, the era’s technological trammeling. The allure of sunny days, for that matter. Anything but the book writers.

Soon Michael Buscio, a waiter at Radicchio, brought out our food, cautioned us that the plates were hot, and spotted “The Catcher in the Rye” sitting on the table. Buscio is a tall man with a thin, angel-fish-type face who talks with the swaggering cadences of a Goodfella. “I see you got ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ there,” he said. “That’s a good book.” He hadn’t heard about Salinger’s death. “He died today? Oh, too bad. That’s a good book.” He’d read it first in high school, and then a second time when, he said, “I got more of what it’s about. First time was for school, and I never liked to read what I had to read.” The book spoke to him, as it seems to do nearly unfailingly to everyone, in a personal way. But he wasn’t unaware of the ambiguity of interpretation. “I mean, it also turned people into assassins, you know?” he said, in reference to Mark David Chapman’s murder of John Lennon.

Don’t you sometimes sit down with a book, pour yourself a glass of wine or a mug of tea, and just feel—unbearably smug? It’s okay, I do it too: it’s normal to display (a little too ostentatiously) that you are reading "Ulysses" on the subway, while your fellow passengers dig into AM New York. You’re doing your small part to hold off the contemporary world’s tidal wave of ignorance and illiteracy and baseness and you deserve a little pat on the back, you warrior. But, if you want to do real good while reading, you can pick up Profile Books’ forthcoming series "Ox-Tales." The set of four books, which came out last summer in England to laudatory reviews, features a total of thirty-eight original short stories, extracts from novels-in-progress, and (one) poem by authors like Zoë Heller, Hanif Kureishi, Geoff Dyer, Hari Kunzru, John Le Carré, and Lionel Shriver. All royalties go to Oxfam and each of the volumes is themed around a key area of Oxfam’s work: water projects (water), areas of war and conflict (fire), agricultural development (earth), and climate change (air). But, like any good literary work, you don’t need to get all these allusions to enjoy the books: the ox might as well refer to the burly animal, the books’ themes to the four seasons, and the cutely colorful covers to their contents. The stories stand on their own.

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Great images of books from around the world and the Web.

Six editions of "The Catcher in the Rye:" Clockwise from top left: 1. First edition/Book Club edition, 1951. 2. Original First Edition, 1951. 3. Grosset & Dunlap 1951 reprint. 4. First-edition paperback, 1953. 5. Hamish Hamilton (London) reprint. 6. Penguin Books 1984 reprint.

(Available on the History Bound Web site.)

Have you taken a photograph of books worth a thousand words? E-mail us with caption and credit information.

We chatted today with the magnificent Joan Schenkar, the author of “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” about all things Patricia Highsmith. A transcript of our discussion follows.

THE NEW YORKER: Hi Everyone. It’s Macy, Vicky, and Jon here, and we’re getting ready to kick things off. Joan, first question: How did you first become interested in writing about the talented Patricia Highsmith?

JOAN SCHENKAR: I backed into it, really. I have always been interested in women who go too far — and Highsmith went further than anyone. And the fact that writing about her would keep me in Europe was a tempting prospect. But the real answer is: i didn’t know what i was getting into.

QUESTION FROM THESSALY LA FORCE: How long did it take you to write this biography?

JOAN SCHENKAR: It took the better part of eight years: researching, interviewing, writing and probably an extra two years of thinking (folded into the eight). It was — and i expect it will remain — the most difficult and in many ways the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.

THE NEW YORKER: Did you have much contact with Highsmith or her work beforehand or did you feel you got to know Highsmith through writing the biography?

JOAN SCHENKAR: I only got to know her by trailing her through Europe and the United States. Ambulancy — divination by waking in her physical and psychological footsteps — was my method. I had read several of her books before I began this project — but not with the kind of attention that would have revealed her to me. Highsmith has to be read with extreme attention.

QUESTION FROM CLWALKER: At any point in the process did you feel like backing out of the project? did it get to be too much? all her lovers, all the moving around, all the books….

It seems we’ve taxed your brains a little bit this week, players, and given you something of a doozy. So, we’ve revealed two of the covers below, leaving just two to solve. What did President Obama say last night? Oh, right: “We don’t quit.” Well, you shouldn’t either. Good luck!

You can still submit the first fully correct response via e-mail and win a copy of the humor anthology “On the Money: The Economy in Cartoons, 1925-2009.” In the event of confusion, consult our official rules. We’ll announce the winner tomorrow afternoon.