Dear Mr. Salinger

You’ll have to excuse me in my writing to you. I wish that this wouldn’t be such a contrarian effort. I feel like I know you. Or perhaps that is far too bold a thing to say. Perhaps I mean to say that I feel that you would under­stand me. Holden, being borne from you, is someone I’d love to meet. He and I are so similar in so many ways. We both seem to have that angst against the idiocy of society, that desire to make the world right; that sense of alien­ation and isolation from society because of our diverging morals and values. Yet it is precisely that lone­liness and solitary standing that would drive us to avoid each other. So perhaps it is enough to simply know that there is at least one strug­gling soul out there who knows what it is to be the lone wolf who sees the phonies for who they are, who refuses to become one himself.

I just want to say that Catcher in the Rye was an incredible piece of work that I hope will live on forever. It is a veri­table master­piece, a work of literary art that I can only dream of aspiring to. I hope that I can walk in your footsteps…my dream is to publish just one astounding novel. I don’t want the fame, I don’t want to be a legend, I don’t even want the money. I just want to create some­thing as profound as you have Mr. Salinger. And then I’d disappear from this torrid world of false­hoods and insin­cerity, just like you.

I wish that you and I could’ve bumped into each other on the streets of Manhattan. I wish that I could’ve had sat down with you in Central Park for just five minutes. No Mr. Salinger, I am not a star­fucker. I just wished that I could’ve gleaned even a sliver of your literary talent and received just a few wise words of encouragement.

I am forever indebted to you Mr. Salinger, for your literary inspi­ration and emotional catharsis. May you rest in peace.