Why are we still waiting for J.D. Salinger?

I was a teenager when I first read The Catcher in the Rye, and I remember thinking, quite seriously, that I wanted to be a writer, not in some abstract, romantic way, but with a kind of visceral clarity that made me look at books differently from then on. 

Holden Caulfield's voice felt like it had kicked the door open. It was messy, alive, and full of feeling. It didn’t sound like a book was supposed to sound, and that was precisely the point.

Minor works, major joy: Why we should read authors’ lesser-known texts

Not every literary treasure announces itself with a full-page review or a Booker Prize shortlist. Some arrive quietly, tucked into the back of collected editions or discovered decades after their author’s death.

These are the misfit texts: the ghost stories, experimental fragments, and one-off essays that never quite made it into the canon but hold a strange power all their own. They’re small, sometimes imperfect, but full of clues. In them, we catch glimpses of writers unguarded, playful, or restless, working things out before the world was watching.