Joyce Maynard
| Joyce Maynard | |
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Maynard at the 2010 Texas Book Festival
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| Born |
November 5, 1953 Durham, New Hampshire, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, memoirist, journalist |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1981–present |
| Genre | Fiction, memoir, true crime, young adult |
| Notable works | To Die For, At Home in the World |
| Years active | 1972–present |
| Spouse |
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| Children |
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| Website | |
| joycemaynard |
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Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American novelist and journalist. She received much attention from the press with the publication of her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, in which she wrote that she had lived with the writer J. D. Salinger when he was 53 and she was 18.
Maynard was born in Durham, New Hampshire, the daughter of Fredelle (née Bruser), a journalist, writer, and English teacher, and Max Maynard, a painter and professor of English. Her father was born in India to English missionary parents and later moved to Canada; her mother was born in Saskatchewan to Jewish immigrants from Russia.
Maynard attended the Oyster River school district and Phillips Exeter Academy. She won Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, and 1971. In her teens, she wrote regularly for Seventeen magazine. She entered Yale University in 1971 and sent a collection of her writings to the editors of The New York Times Magazine. They asked her to write an article, which was published under the title "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" in the magazine's April 23, 1972 issue. After the article was published, she got a letter from fiction writer J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity.
Maynard and Salinger exchanged letters. After her freshman year at Yale, she moved into his house in Cornish, New Hampshire. Salinger and his wife had divorced in 1967. While living with him for ten months, Maynard wrote her first book, a memoir titled Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, which was published in 1973 soon after Maynard and Salinger ended their relationship.
Maynard withheld from her published work information about their relationship until her 1998 memoir At Home in the World. During the same year, she auctioned the letters that Salinger had written to her. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,500 and returned them to Salinger.
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