Byline: Elizabeth Keenan

THE great J.D. Salinger once flirted with the idea of moving to Tasmania. The famously reclusive author was attracted by its wild beauty and its "ultra-remoteness".

But he soon reverted to type. Except for occasional trips abroad (he was especially fond of England and Scotland), he stayed put in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he'd moved after the success of The Catcher In The Rye and where last week, a month after his 91st birthday, he died.

Much of that time he spent at his desk. Writers have few disciplines, Salinger once remarked, but the ones they did have should be pretty near absolute. When I visited him in the late '70s, he was still writing for long hours each day.

Writing was "what I'm cut out to do", he said. As an army sergeant in Europe in 1944, he had carried...