Word: maynards
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Poor Joyce Maynard. Not since Martina Hingis submarined a serve to Steffi Graf in the French Open has a woman been so universally excoriated for underhanded conduct. And all Maynard did was sell a bunch of mash notes she had saved from a boyfriend of 27 years ago to raise college tuition for her children. Except that the boyfriend happened to be J.D. Salinger--the eremite of Cornish...
...those of you unfamiliar with l'affaire Salinger, here are the highlights. In 1972 Yale undergrad Maynard wrote an article called "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life." Salinger, who was 53, read the piece and started sending Maynard letters declaring the two were soul mates. Maynard dropped out and moved in with Salinger, making herself throw up, as she puts it. This is interesting because so much of what Maynard does now seems to make other people throw up (New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called her a "leech" woman and the National Review referred...
Anyway, Salinger broke off the relationship after less than a year. Maynard kept her mouth shut for 25 years until telling all in a memoir and then putting 14 of Salinger's love letters on the auction block. Peter Norton, a Silicon Valley tycoon, bought the letters last week for $156,000 and announced that he was going to return them to Salinger. For this, Norton has been hailed a noble do-gooder, although I think he's a bit of a killjoy, using his money to quash a nice little scandal right at the beginning of summer...
...question Maynard's motives in all this. I assume her thinking was: if making this relationship public can provide solace to just one other opportunistic nymphet leech who's had a traumatic affair with a pathologically phobic and exploitative author, then it will all have been worth...
...Baekeland, plastics pioneer --Tim Berners-Lee, Internet designer --Rachel Carson, environmentalist --Albert Einstein, physicist --Philo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television --Enrico Fermi, atomic physicist --Alexander Fleming, bacteriologist --Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst --Robert Goddard, rocket scientist --Kurt Godel, mathematician --Edwin Hubble, astronomer --John Maynard Keynes, economist --The Leakey Family, anthropologists --Jean Piaget, child psychologist --Jonas Salk, virologist --William Shockley, solid-state physicist --Alan Turing, computer scientist --James Watson & Francis Crick, molecular biologists --Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher --The Wright Brothers, visionary aviators...