"On the jacket flap [of Franny & Zooey, 1961] Salinger provided a throwaway self-interview (throwaway in every sense, since the words are not repeated in the body of the actual book):
'The author writes: FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957, by ZOOEY. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I am doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I am very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.'A couple of stories in the series besides FRANNY and ZOOEY have already been published in The New Yorker, and some new material is scheduled to appear there soon or Soon. I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper, too, but I expect to be fussing with it, to use a popular trade term, for some time to come. ("Polishing" is another dandy word that comes to mind.) I work like greased lightening, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.
'It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candor, that I live in Westport with my dog.'"