Last month, three of J.D. Salinger’s unpublished stories were leaked. One of these stories, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” includes a young Holden Caulfield, and describes his brother’s death, “an incident only alluded to in the novel.”
In an essay featured by The Millions, Ian Rogers discusses the importance of respecting Salinger’s wishes to view “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” as an experiment rather than a prequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
Writers experiment with ideas when they’re writing novels. When these ideas don’t work, the writer throws them away. When they kind of work, the writer reshapes them into something that does.
