[2][3] The circumstances and considerations that led chief fiction editor William Shawn at The New Yorker to devote virtually the entire June 19, 1965, edition to "Hapworth 16, 1924" are obscure.
Orchises Press owner Roger Lathbury has described the effort in The Washington Post and, three months after Salinger's death, in New York magazine.
"[9] Crucial to any to any approach to the Glass family stories is a recognition of Salinger's refusal to recast standard literary forms, a tendency that becomes most manifest in the diffuse and digressive Seymour: An Introduction and the shapeless and interminable "Hapworth.
[14] Both contemporary and later literary critics harshly panned "Hapworth 16, 1924"; writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it "a sour, implausible and, sad to say, completely charmless story .... filled with digressions, narcissistic asides and ridiculous shaggy-dog circumlocutions.
"[15] Calling it "virtually unreadable" and "an enigma", critic John Wenke compares "Hapworth" to viewing a neighbor's unedited family home movies.
[16] He writes: Possibly the least structured and most tedious piece of fiction ever produced by an important writer, "Hapworth" seems designed to bore, to tax patience, as if Salinger was trying to torment his readers.
[17][18]Wenke adds that the story is a striking departure from the "urbane, pithy and wry" short fiction The New Yorker's editors and readership favored.
The story fostered a suspicion that...Salinger attempted to release himself from the affections of average readers by feeding them a work that was completely indigestible.
[21]Biographer Ian Hamilton concurs that Salinger appears to abandon his loyal readership and retreat into the exclusive realm of his characters.