Salinger's house to open up for cartoonist residency

 

JD Salinger's house to open up for cartoonist residency

This article is more than 5 years old

The reclusive author’s New Hampshire former home is being offered as a workspace for young artists after it was bought by illustrator Harry Bliss

Alison Flood
Friday 9 September 2016

Fans of the reclusive author JD Salinger, who also happen to have a penchant for art – and and four-wheel drives – are in for a treat as the former home of the late Catcher in the Rye author is to be opened up for a cartoonist residency.

Salinger moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1953, two years after The Catcher in the Rye was published and the same year he released Nine Stories. After the publication of Hapworth 16, 1924 in 1965, he would publish no more novels, withdrawing from public life and dying in 2010. The novelist’s first home in Cornish was bought this summer by the cartoonist Harry Bliss, who has worked with the Centre for Cartoon Studies to set up the residency.

The residency, which is designed “to create a nurturing environment for cartoonists in order to create exceptional work”, is open for applications now and will start in February. As well as a talent for cartooning, the centre said residents will need to own or rent “a dependable car (with snow tires or four-wheel drive)”, be happy to shovel the walkway and empty the dehumidifier, and be “comfortable living in a rural setting”.

“Set on 12 acres in Cornish, NH, the secluded home is reached by travelling a mile and half down a winding dirt road. The one-bedroom apartment is equipped with a kitchen, studio, and claw foot tub,” said the centre, which will provide an honorarium of $600 (£450) for the successful applicant.

Bliss, a cartoonist at the New Yorker and former board member at the Centre for Cartoon Studies, showed New Yorker correspondent Sarah Larson around the property. The residency apartment, she wrote, is reached through a tunnel from the main property in order that Salinger could go back and forth between the house and a studio apartment above the garage without being seen from outside.

“Bliss said that Salinger had liked to go there to be alone and work, and had stayed there toward the end of his first marriage. Bliss had been thinking that it might be a good space to have young artists to come and use,” Larson wrote.

“The idea of nurturing a graphic novelist – I’m so into it,” Bliss told her. “This idea that you could go somewhere and be away from everything and have that intimacy with your work.”

THE GUARDIAN