In a way, Salinger is still exerting similar control over our ability to define his legacy two years after his death on Jan. 27, 2010 – and he is using his writings to maintain that control. The difficulty in defining Salinger’s legacy stems from his decades of seclusion after his last publication in 1965 and the stubborn hope of millions that he continued to write for the next 45 years.

What have we learned about those years since Salinger’s death?

We now know that the author had an ironically un-Zen-like penchant for Burger King (a curious revelation considering we somehow imagined him consisting on a diet of bean sprouts) and he was not above taking a bus tour of Niagara Falls.

He was enthusiastic about the ballet, reveling in a 1951 London performance of “Swan Lake” and a 1982 Balanchine presentation at the all-too-phony Paris Opera House. That same year, Salinger lamented that only two “people” had ever truly known him: his son, Matthew, and his dog, Benny, the serene schnauzer that Salinger had brought home from Germany in 1946 and who had died nearly 30 years before.

For a time, Salinger seriously considered abandoning writing altogether and devoting his life to Eastern religion, a choice that would likely have involved joining a monastic order. Salinger reconsidered. He found “the chase” of pinning down a good story more enticing than a lifetime of meditation.

We’ve also learned of Salinger’s passion for sweaters, his fondness for tennis and baseball, his late-life interest in Christian Science, and his enduring devotion to the Vedantic branch of Hinduism. The author sent holiday greetings to the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York every year from 1952 until his death in 2010, usually accompanied by a generous donation.

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But these facts amount to little more than inconsequential trivia when compared to the overriding question that the world is still asking: What was Salinger writing all of those years, and is it any good?

If the fistful of Salinger letters that have emerged since 2010 impart any significant news, it is the constant confirmation by Salinger himself that he was indeed still writing during the decades of his seclusion and amassing a considerable body of work. Pages that dissatisfied the author, he burned rather than risk them being retrieved from the trash. A fire that destroyed much of his home in 1992 providentially spared his writing studio where he stored his manuscripts, convincing Salinger to purchase a small fireproof vault in which to safeguard the trove. Neighbors recall him, even at age 90, intently filling in a small notebook he apparently carried everywhere.

These and numerous other references are tantalizing clues to what may potentially prove to be the greatest group of posthumous publications since Kafka – and the hope of Salinger enthusiasts worldwide. But where is Salinger’s Max Brod?

So far, the world has been denied access to Salinger’s legendary hoard of unpublished works and his estate (which legally consists of his widow and son) has refused to acknowledge even the existence of the mysterious manuscripts, much less offer any hope that they will be made available to an anxious reading public. In all likelihood, that decision relies upon Salinger’s last will and testament, the contents of which are rumored to contain a clause requesting that the author’s family wait a number of years before publishing anything new, if only to forestall Salinger’s own fans from dancing on his grave.

And that’s the problem we face in defining Salinger’s legacy. It is impossible to judge the last 45 years of his life without knowing what he was writing at the time.

Suppose Salinger completed a dozen books while holed up in Cornish and left them for his heirs to sort through upon his death. If they all consist of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” then Salinger’s reclusion will be viewed as a selfish act, void or even destructive of creativity, and he will retain his reputation as having been an eccentric recluse.

But if Salinger’s manuscripts contain a single book or story that rivals the effect or quality of “The Catcher in the Rye,” then Salinger’s withdrawal will be judged very differently, indeed. The author, whose refusal has been long ridiculed and resented, will be regarded as a monastic genius who resisted the lures of the world in order to serve the requirements of his unique creativity.

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Rumors and stories about J.D. Salinger in his later years are numerous and offer a voyeuristic fascination with a life otherwise concealed. Yet few would argue that the overwhelming contribution of Salinger’s life was to American literature and that he is best assessed as a writer and not as a folklore oddity. It is exactly that standard of evaluation that has left him gatekeeper of the scales. The author, who was famous for demanding control over every detail of his work while living, is still in control. In a sense, J.D. Salinger has been able to cheat death because – in the continued absence of his unpublished manuscripts – he has managed to deny us the ability to measure the second half of his life and to determine his full impact upon literature. Two years on, we are no closer to cementing Salinger’s legacy than we were on the day that he died.

A convergence of factors makes it likely that somehow, someday, there will be a movie. True, a lawyer for the Salinger estate said, “There are no plans to sell the film rights.” But that only sounds definitive until you get to the part of the Telegraph story that says the writer’s estate could be hit with a huge, retroactive estate tax bill that could be settled fast by auctioning the film rights to “Catcher” — and that a 1957 letter by the author described those unsold rights as “a kind of insurance policy” that could support his wife and daughter if he ran out of money. When’s the last time a lawyer won an argument with an accountant?

“The Catcher in the Rye” should never be made into a movie. Period.

To entertain such thoughts requires the would-be adapter to ignore three strong arguments against adaptation: Holden’s opinion, Salinger’s wishes and the reader’s own idiosyncratic relationship with the novel.

Holden’s likely position is there in black-and-white, so let’s move on to Salinger’s — but not for long, because there isn’t much difference, really. The novelist hated Hollywood as intensely as Holden did and spent years rebuffing anyone and everyone who tried to sweet-talk him into giving up the rights. Samuel Goldwyn, Jerry Lewis, Harvey Weinstein, Steven Spielberg and others all came courting and were rebuffed.

The writer famously said the novel was “unactable” by anyone but himself (he briefly considered letting Elia Kazan turn it into a play, then changed his mind). And he held a grudge against the American film industry for all sorts of reasons, including his busted relationship with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona (who ultimately married Charlie Chaplin), and a previous negative experience with adaptation (Salinger’s 1948 short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was the basis for 1949′s “My Foolish Heart,” which he hated).

I realize Holden qualifies his hatred in “Catcher” by conceding there are good movies and bad movies and that his beloved kid sister Phoebe has a knack for identifying the good ones. I also realize everyone has a favorite book that they would rather not see turned into a film, and when filmmakers adapt it anyway, the result can sometimes be good, sometimes great. (Telegraph writer Harry Mount encouraged such thinking in a column suggesting “Catcher” could work on-screen if the filmmakers relied on voice-over narration drawn from Salinger’s text.) And it’s true that there are more examples of novels that were adapted to film against the author’s wishes (during or after the writer’s lifetime) and turned out rather well.

But “Catcher” is a special case, because Salinger specifically and repeatedly said the film should not be adapted and never gave anyone the chance — and his stubbornness meant that several generations of readers treated the book as a unique experience, a book that would only ever be a book. Knowing Salinger’s opinion on this matter only amplifies the experience of reading “Catcher” — makes it more personal. You may see a movie in your mind as you turn the pages, but it’s your movie, and it’s playing for an audience of one.

That all means that if some intrepid person did persevere and somehow manage to make a “Catcher” movie, it wouldn’t matter how good it was, because on some level, we’d all know its very existence rebuked what Salinger stood for. Even if it turned out to be a finely wrought adaptation of a classic novel, it would still feel like an act of petty dominance over a man who could no longer fight back, and an act of vandalism on par with another famous scene in Salinger’s book, the one where Holden sees that someone has written “fuck you” on a school wall and rubs it off:

“You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any,” Holden says. “You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you.’ I’m positive.”

I find these portraits of Salinger as a noble loner curious. They certainly aren’t accurate. There is ample evidence that he did not lead a solitary life apart from the rest of humanity. Salinger was married three times, and had numerous other long- and short-term romantic engagements. He seduced Joyce Maynard after seeing her on a magazine cover. He dated actress Elaine Joyce during the 1980s while she was appearing on such shows as “Fantasy Island,” “Magnum, PI,” “Simon and Simon” and “Murder, She Wrote.” He had three grandchildren. He went into New York for dinner with friends. He was apparently active in his community, greeting clerks at the store, attending church suppers and town meetings, and shopping at Price Chopper. He spent a lot of time with his lawyers. And this is just the stuff we know about. One wonders if Emily Dickinson, that other famous literary recluse, now sees how much she could have gotten away with and still maintained her recluse cred.

It’s not hard to see why the idea of J.D. Salinger as an asocial genius appeals. Living in a world of tabloid television and gossip Web sites, it is comforting to think of a higher intellect who has rejected it all. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s New York Times editorial celebrated this romantic ideal: “There was a purity in Mr. Salinger’s separation from the world, whatever its motives, whatever his character. His half-century of solitude and silence was a creative act in itself, requiring extraordinary force of will.” Insisting on Salinger’s reclusiveness has given us an antihero nearly as influential as Salinger’s greatest creation, Holden Caulfield.

But I think there is another, more insidious reason that the literary establishment is so invested in the fictional, reclusive Salinger. It is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger’s personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths about one of America’s most revered authors. Both Joyce Maynard and Salinger’s daughter Margaret were vilified for violating the great man’s privacy when they wrote about their own experiences with him and exposed his predatory, controlling relationships with women. Instead of exploring the insights these revelations might bring to readings of Salinger’s work (not to mention the women’s right to tell their own stories), critics dismissed their books as exploitative, attention-seeking stunts. When Maynard decided to sell some of the letters Salinger had written her — letters that confirmed her story of their affair — the response was even more bitter. A typical reaction was that of author Cynthia Ozick, who wrote that Maynard “has never been a real artist and has no real substance and has attached herself to the real artists in order to suck out his celebrity.” This sort of backlash is not exclusive to Salinger — when Pablo Picasso’s former wives and lovers began to expose him as a physically and emotionally abusive man, they were subject to similar criticisms.

As feminists have long known, the personal is political, and women who tell unpleasant truths rarely find a receptive audience. Anyone who got into an argument about Roman Polanski this past year knows how desperately fans can cling to their icons, despite clear evidence of wrongdoing. Acknowledging the experiences of Margaret Salinger or Joyce Maynard would mean deviating from the Salinger myth. To shut such conversations down, we’re told to be rational and to “separate the art from the artist.” But those insisting on this separation aren’t rejecting biographical details as part of how we understand works of art, they are merely insisting we use their narrative, in order to reach their conclusions.

Continuing to believe in the mythically reclusive Salinger and disallowing the presence of the women in his life doesn’t do anyone any good. We need to be able to appreciate art in all of its complicated contexts. Artists — both men and women — have personal lives, and they are often messy. Picasso painted compelling portraits of women he had abused. Roman Polanski assaulted a young woman and made taut, thoughtful films. J.D. Salinger went to church suppers and hooked up with actresses. I hope that in the wake of J.D. Salinger’s death, his real story can now be told. Let’s leave the fiction on the shelf.

Mikki Halpin is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is currently at work on a book about fandom. 

Bin Laden sought seclusion in the mountains of Afghanistan following the disastrous attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.  Salinger sought seclusion in the mountains of New Hampshire following the disastrous reviews of the film version of his story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.”  The two men were never seen together, and mysteriously canceled a scheduled appearance on “The Hollywood Squares” when they learned that Wally Cox would not be a member of the show’s nine-celebrity “tic-tac-toe” box.

Wally Cox and Joyce Maynard:  No connection, but the lack of any parallels is rather eerie.

Both Salinger and bin Laden became increasingly eccentric in their later years, with Salinger drinking his own urine according to his lover Joyce Maynard, a woman half Salinger’s age who, like him, scored an early literary success.  Her world-weary adolescent memoir “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life” caught the attention of Salinger, who sent her a letter complimenting her style “because you obviously copied it from mine.”

Salinger was highly opinionated about the jacket design of his book. Being notoriously uncomfortable with fame, he asked to have his image taken off the dust jacket, and he objected to James Avati’s art for the paperback (he didn’t want any art on it at all). When Salinger switched to Bantam Press, the book was published with just a red cover, title and author name. “The Catcher in the Rye” has since appeared in many editions, in many countries, and we’ve assembled some of the most memorable jackets here (along with one recent homage on the cover of Frank Portman’s novel, “King Dork”).

Click here to view the slide show.