Happy birthday Salinger

It's JD Salinger's 90th birthday, the party starts at three and the world and his wife are invited. Actually they're not. Instead, Salinger will be spending this anniversary as he is reputed to have spent the last 40 or 50: holed up in Cornish, New Hampshire surrounded by a stack of unpublished manuscripts.

All of which poses a dilemma for those who hold him dear. How does one go about celebrating the life of a writer who – so far as we're concerned – hasn't written since the Civil Rights era? Is it an intrusion to even wish him happy birthday to begin with? Why draw attention to a man who wants for nothing but to be left alone?

Reeling from the success of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger withdrew from public view in the mid-1950s. He published Franny and Zooey in 1961, a collection of novellas (Raise High the Room Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction) in 1963 and then bowed out with a New Yorker short story in 1965. Since then he has spoken only fitfully via his lawyers or been snapped in furious, cowering poses on the roads around his home. And woe betide any of those misguided fans who track him down to explain that they, like, totally love him and can so relate to his retreat from a world of phony bastards. "No you don't," he reportedly told one such visitor. "Or you wouldn't be here."