The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls

‘The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls’ is a short story by J.D. Salinger which was completed in 1945 and sold to the ‘Women’s Home Companion’, a monthly magazine, in 1947.
Apparently the publisher felt the story was ‘downbeat’ and refused to publish it in the ‘Women’s Home Companion’ in 1947 and in ‘Collier’s Weekly’ in 1951.
Around this time Salinger bought the story back and it has never been published.
The story is about the death of Kenneth Caulfield who would appear as Allie in Salinger’s most famous work ‘The Catcher in the Rye’.
Today the only place that the story can be read is in the Firestone Library at Princeton University. The manuscript is one of a number of Salinger’s works that the University holds but access to the stories are tightly controlled according to Salinger’s very specific instructions.
Visitors must present two forms of identification and are then supervised as they read the story behind the closed doors of a particular reading room.
Salinger also ordered that the story could not be published until 50 years after he died.
J.D. Salinger died on January 27th 2010.
That gives us an earliest publication date of January 27th 2060...