Salinger To Get Letters Back

J.D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard both got what they wanted.

The 14 letters Salinger sent his teen-age girlfriend in the early 1970s sold for $156,500 Tuesday to a retired California software millionaire who promised to return them to the reclusive author.

Maynard, who said she wanted to use the proceeds from the Sotheby's auction to send her children to college, will profit handsomely from the sale of the letters, which fetched twice their estimate of $60,000 to $80,000.

But Salinger won't have to suffer further affronts to his cherished privacy, says buyer Peter Norton, a Santa Monica, Calif., philanthropist whose company, Peter Norton Computing Inc., created the popular Norton Utilities programs.

"I share the widely expressed opinion that the work should be bought by someone sympathetic to Mr. Salinger's desire for privacy," Norton, 56, said in a statement. "I plan to return the letters to Mr. Salinger or do whatever else Mr. Salinger lets me know he wants done with them."

Norton placed his bid in advance and was not at Sotheby's auction house Tuesday.

Maynard, a writer, was heavily criticized for deciding to sell Salinger's letters.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd labeled her a "leech," and the National Review magazine called her an "opportunistic one-time nymphet."

Salinger was, of course, silent. Now age 80, he lives in Cornish, N.H., and still shuns publicity. He has not published in 34 years.

Maynard, a divorced mother of three, had said supporting her children is more important to her than protecting Salinger's privacy.

"My decision to sell these letters is not some kind of act of retribution against Salinger," Maynard, now 45, had said before Tuesday's auction. "It's a financial decision. I'd rather put my efforts to supporting my three children than to have a box of Salinger letters."

Maynard did not attend the auction and was not available to comment Tuesday, Sotheby's said.

Maynard partially excerpted the letters in her 1998 book, At Home in the World, which also detailed her romance with Salinger, which took place when he was 53 and she was 18.

The two began corresponding in 1972, when he wrote her to praise a story she wrote for The New York Times Magazine, called An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.