Joanna Smith Rakoff just started as an assistant at Harold Ober Associates in 1996 (who was J.D. Salinger’s literary representative) and one of the tasks she has to do was take care of Salinger’s fan mail.
The rules were to NEVER give out Salinger’s phone number or address and give them the standard form letter as a reply.

Some of these letter writers wanted something specific from Salinger—his permission to make a film version of one story or another, often—but most simply wanted a letter back from him. For the most part, they knew that Salinger didn’t read his fan mail—in fact, he’d insisted that nothing, not one letter, be passed on to him—but each was convinced that his letter was going to be the one that was so moving, so brilliant, so funny, so perfectly aligned with Salinger’s interests and sensibilities, that we, at Ober, would pass it on to him. And that Salinger would then, of course, recognize the writer—the teenage girl from Japan, the World War II veteran in Kansas—as a kindred spirit and write back. Though the authors of these letters varied in age and nationality, there was a theme common to nearly all the letters: Salinger was the only person who understood them.

Read the rest of the Slate article here.

(credit: Scott Lamb)