Joyce Maynard

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Cover of Looking Back

Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American writer who, in addition to her own literary career, is well-known for her relationship with J. D. Salinger.

Maynard grew up in Durham, New Hampshire and attended local public schools before joining the first coeducational class at Phillips Exeter Academy. As a young woman, 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 for them, which was published as An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life on April 23, 1972. The article garnered a great deal of attention, including a letter from J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity. They continued to correspond, and after finishing her freshman year, Maynard visited Salinger in New Hampshire. She dropped out of Yale and lived with Salinger for ten months. She published her first book, Looking Back, at the age of twenty.

For many years, Maynard chose not to discuss her affair with Salinger in any of her writings, but she broke her silence in a memoir called At Home In The World. In 1999 she outraged many of Salinger's fans by selling his letters to her, saying that she was forced to do so for financial reasons; she would have preferred to donate them to Beinecke Library. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,926 and announced his intention to return them to JD Salinger.

Maynard gained widespread commercial acceptance with the publication of her novel To Die For, which drew several elements from the Pamela Smart murder case. It was later produced as a film, starring Nicole Kidman and Matt Dillon, directed by Gus Van Sant. Her nonfiction book Internal Combustion deals with a similar real-life case, that of Michigan resident Nancy Seaman, convicted of killing her husband in 2004.

After living in the Bay Area for ten years, in 2006 she accepted a job to teach at a writers' workshop run by the University of Southern Maine USM, one of Maine's public schools.