Woman With Only Recording of J.D. Salinger Will Take Tape to Grave
How do you put a price on the voice of an author who wrote one of the seminal works of American literature?
Illustration: Claire Merchlinsky for Bloomberg Businessweek
On June 13, 1980, Betty Eppes got the interview of a lifetime. The 40-year-old reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate had just completed treatment for breast cancer and returned to the newsroom determined to do “something that I thought was significant,” she told me from her current home in Pearl, Miss.
So she talked to her editor and made a list of the people she believed to be the most difficult in the world to interview: Ugandan President Idi Amin and authors Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger. She quickly landed on The Catcher in the Rye author, who hadn’t published anything since 1965 and had given his last interview in 1953.