Salinger wanted his works to be published after his death.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/books/jd-salinger-new-boo...

"But in 2013, a documentary about the author and a related book offered a bold assertion: He had not only continued writing, but also left detailed notes to his trust about releasing the material between 2015 and 2020."

Why not take that to its logical conclusion and claim: if he truly never wanted them to be read, he would never have written them in the first place?

To me it seems credible that a writer might want to hold on to some drafts, hoping to get round to editing them for publication, but doesn't want them edited by anyone else or published unedited. The question is, how to achieve that, seeing as one can't trust one's heirs? There are probably both legal and technical solutions.

Writers don’t only write to be read.

Maybe he wrote them as practice. Maybe he wrote them to experiment with a new style. Maybe he wrote them to explore his thoughts and feelings. Who knows.

It does appear that he was okay with these things being published, but in the general case it’s not true that someone writing means they want or intend it to be published or even read.

He should have put in his will and testament that all unfinished drafts should be destroyed. I don't believe it is possible to will property to people but put indefinite restrictions on legal usage of the property. I forget the exact term, but the restriction was put in place so that you don't get into a situation where estates are confined to operate in the manner that a long-dead great-great-great-great grandfather specified in their will, in contravention of the wishes of the current property owners who may have not even been alive when the will was written.

Perhaps you're thinking of "mortmain", a nice English/French word:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortmain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

There's also the expression "dead hand", but that may also refer to a Soviet strategic defence system, which has also been referred to as "hand from coffin", which is certainly more fun than the official name.

Yes, but you may change your minde after writting it. Sometime you write something, and it's not what you think it would have been, and you don't want people to read it anymore.

This is one area the digital age hasn't come up with an analogue (other than DMCA). Authors in some ways had less control over distribution (aside from self publishing, you had to go through a publishing house) but had more control over what got published.

Now, with digital distribution, once released, you can't put things back in the bottle (with a few exceptions like when Amazon or Apple do "recalls"), but for the most part, you can't undo things and that means authors have less control over what they produce. Maybe authors aren't allowed capriciousness anymore ("burn all my writings upon death").

I imagine he could have kept them as personal reference or for sentimental reasons, still wanting them to remain private.

Also, he's dead, so why do we care?