The day J.D. Salinger died, I was (and still am) trying to figure out the shape and scope of the fiction to come in the new year.

My modern "entrails" of prophecy are the advance copies of novels and short stories scheduled for publication in the summer and fall, the high seasons of American publishing. At last count, there are nearly 100 new works of fiction awaiting readers in 2010, the most I've ever seen.

When news of Mr. Salinger's passing arrived, I left my mountain of upcoming books and starting searching my brain -- and a few reference books -- for the man's work. I realized I hadn't read him in years. At first the best I could manage were memories of a well-worn paperback of "The Catcher in the Rye" I had jammed into the backpocket of my jeans on loan from a high school friend.

The book had made the rounds quietly, like something salacious (this was before somebody discovered Henry Miller) and not in the English department curriculum. That all changed obviously later, and many high schoolers read it as a class assignment.

It was difficult, then, to return to the era when Mr. Salinger numbered among a handful of American fiction writers and had the good fortune to be a favorite of William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker magazine.

Mr. Shawn was also partial to John Cheever, and John Updike whose work found a home in the magazine during the 1950s and '60s. They were a trio of "startlingly precocious, provocatively 'youthful' " writers of the time, wrote critic Alfred Kazin.

While Mr. Cheever and Mr. Updike published volumes in the subsequent decades, Mr. Salinger famously quit after 1965, leaving his slight novel and three dozen or so short stories. His many obituaries told us that, along with guesses as to why he dropped out of the book world.

Mr. Kazin, who remains a solid source of commentary on American fiction, suggested in 1973 that Mr. Salinger stopped writing because he feared the critics.

"Salinger is outraged by the very act of criticism," said Mr. Kazin, and "wants only readers who are faithful loving friends, like his editors at the New Yorker and the armies of young people who gratefully recognized themselves in 'The Catcher in the Rye.'

"He would rather be silent at the moment than to see his imaginative world profaned by criticism."

As Mr. Kazin rightly notes, Mr. Salinger's fictional Glass family, especially the dead Seymour, are exceptional and their Seymour is a saint. The rest of us are "unworthy" and "devalued."

Mr. Salinger's withdrawal from publicity is a source of a kind of resentment from some of his detractors who saw his reclusive life in New Hampshire as a surefire gimmick to attract publicity.

Stories were written with regularity about pilgrimages to the little house in Cornish, N.H., to catch sight of the great writer.

"Ageing rebels, second-year master's students with lacquered nails, broad-shouldered phonies in Norfolk jackets, snappers (photographers) from Newsweek, all approached the cringing little house ...," wrote an anonymous heretic in The Economist.

Others, most famously his daughter, Margaret, and short-lived companion, Joyce Maynard, listed his eccentricities in their books, written perhaps to take advantage of the late writer's fame.

The New Yorker's response was, as expected, reverential, with a warm portrait by Lillian Roth including snapshots and a conventional obituary with the expected literary cliches.

Fame, which Americans cherish for their favorites, never eluded the writer who publicly renounced it. But in his retreat, Mr. Salinger put his work into a cultural deep freeze while the world moved on.

There I will leave him while I look with anticipation to the new and I hope original fiction hiding in those 100 books to come.

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