JD Salinger letters discovered - Telegraph His editor was so taken with the character that he asked Salinger to write an entire series. "I'll try a couple more," Salinger adds, "and if I begin to miss my mark, I'll quit." The letter is signed "Jerry S." Salinger died in seclusion in 2010, aged 91. He was notoriously secretive and little was known of his life. In later exchanges, he asks Sheard not to mention the Holden Caulfield story, which had yet to be published by The New Yorker. "God and Harold Ross [the editor] alone know what that bunch of pixies on the staff are doing with my poor script," he writes. The story was eventually published in 1946. In another letter, dated September 4 1941, Sheard asks Salinger for advice on writing. "Seems to me you have the instincts to avoid the usual Vassar-girl hype," he replies. His tone is encouraging and he suggests that she should submit her work to smaller literary magazines. "You can't go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay," he writes, "but that doesn't really matter, does it?" Salinger sent Sheard a total of nine letters over the next two years, in some of which he openly flirts with her. In one, dated October 9, he asks what she looked like, requesting that she sends him a large photograph. He subsequently apologises for his brazenness. I wrote from a mood - and not a nice one. Sheard eventually sends a photograph of herself, prompting Salinger to reply: "Sneaky girl. You're pretty. He then tells her that he has posted his photograph of himself to a magazine and is having some more made. Rest assured, though, I'm a doll. In other correspondence, he urges Sheard to read The Great Gatby and The Last Tycoon by F Scott Fitzgerald, and says that he rates Tolstoy. "I think he'll go places," he jokes. Sheard is now 95 and living in a nursing home. She kept the letters in a shoe box and only decided to sell them to the Morgan Museum and Library to meet the increasing costs of her care. After her exchanges with Salinger, she became a housewife living in a modest apartment. She never became a published writer. Speaking of Sheard's correspondence with Salinger, her niece, Liza Sheard, told the New York Times: "It's fantasy-like, because this was not her life at all. It's a young woman writing to a superstar and talking to him as if they were peers.