Author. Maynard cut her photograph from the article. I do not believe she explained why. Around the time of this article she was involved romantically with reclusive author J.D. Salinger. He was 53. She was 19. He broke it off just before her first book was published; the article mentions that her first book is due in the Spring. Her first book was a personal memoir. Did I mention she was only 19? At his request she kept the relationship a secret until 1999.
She also had a productive and successful writing career, but the Salinger relationship is the most blogworthy subject.
Received 1/17/1974.
UPDATE: I noticed this earlier but forgot to include it in the original post:
The subject of Maynard’s essay above is how the advancement of science and knowledge can have a negative effect of cluttering minds to sometimes conceal what is important. By way of making that point, she mentions that when her parents were children DNA had not yet been discovered, nor had Pluto, so there were even more planets to keep track of. Maynard never anticipated that Pluto would someday be reclassified as not being a planet, so there are now actually fewer planets to learn and memorize.
The point is not to pick on Maynard. I doubt anyone at that time anticipated Pluto’s eventual fate, and if anyone did they were privy to what must have been a fairly esoteric debate at the time. I just thought it funny that an offhand throwaway line finding a cute way to make anon-controversial point ends up being subverted in a way that probably nobody would ever know or care about except for this project.
