SALINGER, J(erome) D(avid)

Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 1 January 1919. Education: McBurney School, New York, 1932-34; Valley Forge Military Academy, Pennsylvania (editor, Crossed Sabres ), 1934-36; New York University, 1937; Ursinus College, Collegetown, Pennsylvania, 1938; Columbia University, New York, 1939. Military Service: Served in the 4th Infantry Division of the United States Army, 1942-45: Staff Sergeant. Family: Married 1) Sylvia Salinger in 1945 (divorced 1946); 2) Claire Douglas in 1955 (divorced 1967), one daughter and one son. Has lived in New Hampshire since 1953. Agent: Dorothy Olding, Harold Ober Associates, 425 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10017, U.S.A.

Publications

Novel

The Catcher in the Rye. Boston, Little Brown, and London, HamishHamilton, 1951.

Short Stories

Nine Stories. Boston, Little Brown, 1953; as For Esmé—With Love and Squalor and Other Stories, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1953.

Franny and Zooey. Boston, Little Brown, 1961; London, Heinemann, 1962.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Heinemann, 1963.

Uncollected Short Stories

"The Young Folks," in Story (New York), March-April 1940.

"The Hang of It," in Collier's (Springfield, Ohio), 12 July 1941.

"The Heart of a Broken Story," in Esquire (New York), September1941.

"Personal Notes on an Infantryman," in Collier's (Springfield, Ohio), 12 December 1942.

"The Varioni Brothers," in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 17July 1943.

"Both Parties Concerned," in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 26 February 1944.

"Soft-Boiled Sergeant," in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 15April 1944.

"Last Day of the Last Furlough," in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 15 July 1944.

"Once a Week Won't Kill You," in Story (New York), November-December 1944.

"A Boy in France," in The Saturday Evening Post Stories 1942-45, edited by Ben Hibbs. New York, Random House, 1945.

"Elaine," in Story (New York), March-April 1945.

"The Stranger," in Collier's (Springfield, Ohio), 1 December 1945.

"I'm Crazy," in Collier's (Springfield, Ohio), 22 December 1945.

"Slight Rebellion Off Madison," in New Yorker, 21 December 1946.

"A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All," in Mademoiselle (New York), May 1947.

"The Inverted Forest," in Cosmopolitan (New York), December1947.

"Blue Melody," in Cosmopolitan (New York), September 1948.

"The Long Debut of Lois Taggett," in Story: The Fiction of the Forties, edited by Whit and Hallie Burnett. New York, Dutton, 1949.

"A Girl I Knew," in The Best American Short Stories 1949, edited byMartha Foley. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," in The Armchair Esquire, edited by Arnold Gingrich and L. Rust Hills. New York, Putnam, 1958.

"Hapworth 16, 1924," in New Yorker, 19 June 1965.

"Go See Eddie," in Fiction: Form and Experience, edited byWilliam M. Jones. Lexington, Massachusetts, Heath, 1969.

Bibliography:

J.D. Salinger: A Thirty Year Bibliography 1938-1968 by Kenneth Starosciak, privately printed, 1971; J.D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography 1938-1981 by Jack R. Sublette, New York, Garland, 1984.

Critical Studies (selection):

The Fiction of J.D. Salinger by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958, London, Spearman, 1960; Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald, New York, Harper, 1962, London, Owen, 1964; J.D. Salinger and the Critics edited by William F. Belcher and James W. Lee, Belmont, California, Wadsworth, 1962; J.D. Salinger by Warren French, New York, Twayne, 1963, revised edition, 1976, revised edition, as J.D. Salinger Revisited, 1988; Studies in J.D. Salinger edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, New York, Odyssey Press, 1963; J.D. Salinger by James E. Miller, Jr., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1965; J.D. Salinger: A Critical Essay by Kenneth Hamilton, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1967; Zen in the Art of J.D. Salinger by Gerald Rosen, Berkeley, California, Creative Arts, 1977;J.D. Salinger by James Lundquist, New York, Ungar, 1979; Salinger's Glass Stories as a Composite Novel by Eberhard Alsen, Troy, New York, Whitston, 1984; Brodie's Notes on J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, by Catherine Madinaveitia, London, Pan, 1987; In Search of J.D. Salinger by Ian Hamilton, London, Heinemann, and New York, Random House, 1988; Critical Essays on Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye edited by Joel Salzberg, Boston, Hall, 1990; Holden Caulfield edited by Harold Bloom, New York, Chelsea House, 1990; Alienation in the Fiction of Carson McCullers, J.D. Salinger, and James Purdy by Anil Kumar, Amritsar, Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1991; J.D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction by John Wenke, Boston, Twayne, 1991; New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye by Jack Salzman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence Under Pressure by Sanford Pinsker, New York, Twayne, 1993; J.D. Salinger, edited by Harold Bloom, Broomall, Pennsylvania, Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.

In terms of subject matter, the fiction of J.D. Salinger falls into two groups. His most celebrated work, The Catcher in the Rye, tells of several days in the life of a young man, Holden Caulfield, after he has left the school from which he has been expelled; he wanders around New York City in a late-adolescent pursuit of contacts that will have meaning for him. The novel itself is Holden's meditation on these days some months later when he is confined to a West Coast clinic. The rest of Salinger's work, with the exception of some of the stories in Nine Stories, has for its subject elements drawn from the experience of the Glass family who live in New York. The parents, Les and Bessie, are retired vaudeville dancers; Les is Jewish in origin, Bessie Catholic—a fact that announces the merging of religious traditions effected in the lives of their children. The children, begotten over a considerable period of time, are seven in number. They are Seymour, a gifted poet; Buddy, a writer; Walker and Wake, twins—one killed in war, the other finally a priest; Boo Boo, a happily married daughter; and two much younger children, Franny and Zooey.

The diverse subject matter of Salinger's fiction tends, in retrospect, to coalesce. Holden Caulfield's parents, less loving and concerned than the Glass couple, have also begotten several children. But in Holden's case, there is only one child—a ten-year-old girl—to whom Holden can turn in his desperation.

But it is not just the mirror-image of subject matter that binds the Caulfield narrative together with the tales of the Glass family. There is a unity of tone and a prevailing interest that inform all of Salinger's narratives and that have made them appeal deeply to readers for decades. The tone and interest combine to produce a sad, often ironic meditation on the plight of young persons who are coming to maturity in a society where precise and guiding values are absent. This recurrent meditation, concealed in wrappings that are usually grotesque and farcical, has drawn readers to Salinger. His characters move through a "world they never made;" they address questions to that world and receive, for the most part, only a "dusty answer." Casual social contacts so nauseate Holden Caulfield, for example, that he is frequently at the point of vomiting. His quest for love is harassed by the sexual basis of love, and he is repelled. The only good relation in his life rests on the affection he feels for his younger sister; she is the one light in a wilderness of adult hypocrisy, lust, and perversion. In contrast, affection takes in a larger area in the Glass family chronicles; mutual esteem and concern bind the family together and somewhat offset the dreary vision of human relations in The Catcher in the Rye.

Perhaps one reason for this contrast is that, in The Catcher in the Rye, the narrative is presented from the point of view of Holden, a malleable, only half-conscious person. He moves in many directions, but none leads him toward the goals he aspires to. His teachers are "phonies;" the one in whom he puts some trust turns out to be a homosexual. His encounter with a prostitute gives him nothing, and his relations with girls of his class do not offer him the gift of comprehension. His parents are as deceived as he is about the proper use of the gift of life. As indicated, only his younger sister can offer him the love he needs, and she is too immature to counterbalance the panorama of insincerity that unfolds before Holden's eyes. So for Holden, all is in suspense—an effect that appealed strongly to Salinger's readers.

But for members of the Glass family, all is not fully in suspense. That gifted group of young people has indeed been badly shaken by the suicide of Seymour, their most gifted sibling. Thus, the central "mystery" which they must come to terms with is not Holden's general panorama of hypocrisy; the death and even more the remembered life of Seymour contain a secret that they are haunted by. The actual death of Seymour is briefly narrated in the story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in Nine Stories. Later work, told from various points of view, relates the efforts of members of the Glass family to grasp and apply the eclectic religious truths that the memory of Seymour reminds them of. In none of these tales is there an effort to explain the suicide; this is a fact which the brothers and sisters accept rather than assess. What they do assess, in terms of their own later experience, is the teaching presence of Seymour as they recall it. In the two sections of Franny and Zooey, the two youngest members of the family reach out in directions that Seymour, in effect, has already pointed out. In "Franny" the heroine is obsessed by the "Jesus prayer" which she has come across in the memoirs of a Russian monk; she does not know how to pray the prayer and is only aware that, until she does, all her other relations will be without meaning. In "Zooey" her charming brother helps her and himself to come to a grasp of what Seymour's existence had announced: repetition of the Jesus prayer transforms life that is contemptible into a constant act of love and reveals that a "fat lady" is indeed Christ—the "fat lady" and every other human being one encounters. In "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters"—told from the point of view of Buddy, the writing brother—the ridiculous circumstances of Seymour's wedding day are related: Seymour and his fiancée finally elope rather than endure an elaborate and empty wedding ceremony. Finally, in "Seymour: An Introduction"—also told from the point of view of Buddy—all that can be recalled of Seymour is put down. Recalled are his mastery of the allusive oriental haiku and his even more important mastery of the process of extorting the greatest significance from trivial events (e.g., a game of marbles becomes a vehicle of Zen instruction).

It is undoubtedly the merging of Eastern and Western religious wisdom—the solution of the "mystery" of existence—that gives the work of Salinger its particular élan. In pursuit of what might be called the Seymour effect, the other Glasses consume innumerable packs of cigarettes and break out into perspiration when they find themselves in blind alleys. But the alleys occasionally open up, and fleeting vistas of human unity flash before the eyes. One can but hope that Holden Caulfield, in his later years, will meet one of the younger Glasses whose personal destinies swell to the proportions of regulative myth.

—Harold H. Watts

J. D. Salinger

Born: January 1, 1919
New York, New York
American writer

J. D. Salinger, best known for his controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), is recognized by critics and readers alike as one of the most popular and influential authors of American fiction during the second half of the twentieth century.

Growing up in the "House of Glass"

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on January 1, 1919, and like the members of the fictional Glass family that appear in some of his works, was the product of mixed parentage—his father was Jewish and his mother was Scotch-Irish. Salinger's upbringing was not unlike that of Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye, the Glass children, and many of his other characters. Unlike the Glass family with its brood of seven children, Salinger had only an elder sister. He grew up in fashionable areas of Manhattan and for a time attended public schools. Later, the young Salinger attended prep schools where he apparently found it difficult to adjust. In 1934 his father enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy near Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he stayed for approximately two years, graduating in June of 1936.

Salinger maintained average grades and was an active, if at times distant, participant in a number of extracurricular activities. He began to write fiction, often by flashlight under his blankets after the hour when lights had to be turned out. Salinger contributed work to the school's literary magazine, served as literary editor of the yearbook during his senior year, participated in the chorus, and was active in drama club productions. He is also credited with composing the words to the school's anthem.

Published author

In 1938 Salinger enrolled in Ursinus College at Collegeville, Pennsylvania. While at Ursinus he resumed his literary pursuits, contributing a humorous column to the school's weekly newspaper. He left the school after only one semester. Obviously an intelligent and sensitive man, Salinger apparently did not respond well to the structure and rigors of a college education. This attitude found its way into much of his writing, as there is a pattern throughout his work of impatience with formal learning and academic types.

Despite Salinger's dislike of formal education, he attended Columbia University in 1939 and participated in a class on short story writing taught by Whit Burnett (1899–1973). Burnett, a writer and important editor, made a lasting impression on the young author, and it was in the magazine Story, founded and edited by Burnett, that Salinger published his first story, "The Young Folks," in the spring of 1940. Encouraged by the success of this effort, Salinger continued to write and after a year of rejection slips finally broke into the rank of well-paying magazines catering to popular reading tastes.

Salinger entered military service in 1942 and served until the end of World War II (1939–45; a war in which Allied forces led by Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States fought with the Axis forces of Germany, Italy, and Japan). Salinger participated in the Normandy campaign, when Allied forces landed on French shores and turned the tide of the war, and the liberation of France from the occupying German army. He continued to write and publish while in the army, carrying a portable typewriter with him in the back of his jeep. After returning to the United States, Salinger's career as a writer of serious fiction took off. In 1946 the New Yorker published his story "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," which was later rewritten to become a part of The Catcher in the Rye.

The Catcher in the Rye

In 1951 Salinger's masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye landed at bookstores. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown by his disgust for the "phoniness" of the adult world that he is about to enter. He finds peace only in the presence of Phoebe, his young sister. Taking flight from this world, Holden plans to head west, where he hopes to live a peaceful existence in a log cabin. However, he begins his journey by traveling to New York where he plans to say goodbye to his sister, and on the way he participates in a series of humorous adventures. Such a confusion in direction is characteristic of Caulfield, as there seems to be a pattern of impulsive behavior in many of his actions. One of Salinger's more subtle devices is to discredit his main character by placing him in situations wherein his own phoniness is exposed. In these situations his character is made all the more interesting through what readers quickly see as his sensitivity and intelligence.

It is little wonder that The Catcher in the Rye quickly became a favorite among young people; it skillfully demonstrates the adolescent experience with its spirit of rebellion. At various points in history, The Catcher in the Rye has been banned by public libraries, schools, and bookstores due to its presumed profanity (bad language), sexual subject matter, and rejection of traditional American values.

Success

Despite its popular success, the critical response to The Catcher in the Rye was slow in getting underway. It was not until Nine Stories, a collection of previously published short stories came out in 1953 that Salinger began to attract serious critical attention.

Salinger did not publish another book until 1961, when his much anticipated Franny and Zooey appeared. This work consists of two long short stories, previously published in the New Yorker. Each concerns a crisis in the life of the youngest member of his fictional Glass family—the quirky characters who populate most of his work. In 1963 Salinger published another Glass family story sequence, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction, again from two previously published New Yorker pieces. Both stories revolve around the life and tragic death of Seymour Glass, the eldest of the Glass children, as narrated by his brother Buddy Glass, who is frequently identified as Salinger's alter-ego, or a representation of the author's personality.

The myth of J. D. Salinger

While Salinger's fictional characters have been endlessly analyzed and discussed, the author himself has remained a mystery. Since the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, he has consistently avoided contact with the public, obstructing attempts by those wishing to pry into his personal life. In 1987 he successfully blocked the publication of an unauthorized biography by Ian Hamilton. In his lawsuit, Salinger claimed copyright infringement on private matters Hamilton had discovered in the course of research. Even after revising his material, Hamilton was unable to satisfy Salinger or the court and was forced to withdraw the book. In 1988 an extensively revised version of Hamilton's work was published under the title In Search of J. D. Salinger, which represents a comprehensive study of the author and his work.

Deemed the "Summer of Salinger" by columnist Liz Smith, the summer of 1999 saw the release of the latest Salinger biography and the sale of love letters the author wrote to a former girlfriend, which sold for $156,000. The letters were bought by software millionaire Peter Norton, who returned the letters to the author. Paul Alexander's Salinger: A Biography, published on July 15, 1999, is the first full-length Salinger biography since Ian Hamilton's in 1988. Salinger has not made an effort to limit the release of the book, unlike the Hamilton biography.

In 1997 a rumor surfaced that a Salinger story originally printed in the New Yorker in 1965, "Hapworth 16, 1924," was soon to be released in book form. The publication is still planned but no date has been set.

Today Salinger lives in seclusion in rural New Hampshire, writing for his own pleasure and presumably enjoying his private world.

For More Information

Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999.

Bloom, Harold, ed. J. D. Salinger: Modern Critical Views. Chelsea House, 1987.

Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger. New York: Random House, 1988.

Salinger, Margaret A. Dream Catcher: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press, 2000.

SALINGER, J(erome) D(avid)

(b. 1 January 1919 in New York City), author of numerous short stories and four books, including the classic The Catcher in the Rye, who rose to fame in the late 1950s and early 1960s, only to become a recluse intensely possessive of his privacy.

The son of Solomon Salinger, a successful cheese merchant, and Miriam Jillich, a homemaker, Salinger and his older sister grew up in financial comfort in Manhattan. In 1934 his father enrolled him in Valley Forge Military Academy near Wayne, Pennsylvania, where Salinger pursued writing and acting. Despite an average academic performance, Salinger graduated in 1936. He was admitted to New York University for a semester and acted in several New York theatrical productions. He then spent a semester at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, probably to humor his parents. Salinger did average work; reported for the school newspaper, the Ursinus Weekly; and wrote short stories. That spring he enrolled in a writing class taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of Columbia University's Story magazine.

In April 1942 Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Fort Dix in New Jersey. There he started and finished a draft of his most well-known work, The Catcher in the Rye, the timeless story of Holden Caulfield, a young man coming of age. Salinger served overseas after training with the Counter-Intelligence Corps in England. He was involved in the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of France and later hospitalized for combat-related stress. In September 1945 he married a Frenchwoman named Sylvia; they divorced in 1947. Discharged in 1945, Salinger took a break from writing and even turned down an offer from Simon & Schuster to publish a collection of his stories. From 1945 to 1947 he drifted, visiting bars in Greenwich Village with other literary figures.

The Catcher in the Rye, published in July 1951 by Little, Brown, and Company, received excellent reviews and was even called "brilliant" by reviewers, despite a few criticisms for the vulgar language used by the main character. Salinger, always considered a loner, wanted no part of promoting the work. He did not want any advance galleys or review copies of the book sent to the press, and demanded that his picture be removed from the dust jacket, which it eventually was. Salinger even left for England when the book was released. During the mid-1950s, the so-called teenage revolution gave The Catcher in the Rye a second wind and elevated the novel to cult status. An outsider and rebel against the adult establishment, Caulfield's character appealed to the young, and, along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, Caulfield became a student favorite and made Salinger the voice of a generation. By 1956 the book had caught the attention of academics, and by 1961 it had sold 1.25 million copies. The Catcher in the Rye was available in nine countries, translated into thirty languages, and became an international bestseller in the mid-1960s. Its universal appeal and critical success is evidenced by its acceptance as an American classic and its place on high school and college reading lists.

In 1953 Salinger moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, and became a member of the community. Teenagers loved Salinger and visited his house in droves. Also in 1953 Nine Stories, a collection of previously published short stories, was published, just as The Catcher in the Rye was released in paperback. Nine Stories generally received good reviews and was a best-seller for three months. Then in the fall, two local students asked Salinger if they could interview him for the high school page in the (Claremont) Daily Eagle. Salinger agreed, but when the story appeared it did so as a feature in the Eagle, not on the high school page. Salinger responded by barricading himself behind a wooden fence and refusing to grant any more interviews.

Salinger married Claire Douglas, a young Radcliffe student, on 17 February 1955, and they had two children. They divorced in October 1967, shortly after Salinger retreated in seclusion to their New Hampshire farm.

During the first part of the 1960s, Salinger continued to write and publish short stories, but he never published another novel. The material for his two books in the 1960s originally appeared as short stories in magazines during the 1950s. Franny and Zooey (1961), which was on the bestseller list for six months, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), chronicled the life and relationships of the Glass family. In Franny, the story examines Franny's attempt to achieve religious purity and her resulting nervous breakdown. In the sequel, Zooey tries to help his sister out of her emotional and spiritual crisis.

Both Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction are narrated by Buddy Glass and deal with the death of his older brother Seymour Glass. The new works also showed the influence of Salinger's interest in Eastern religion, mostly Zen Buddhism. Although both books became best-sellers, the critical reviews were extremely negative. Critics found Salinger's writing self-indulgent and wordy. Critics were also disappointed that Salinger had failed to develop something new, and that even though he spent ten years on the Glass family, the characters had not evolved and remained static. With both Glass books, Salinger again wanted no prepublication deals.

At least part of Salinger's draw was his reclusive lifestyle. Time, Life, and Newsweek all did features on Salinger during the 1960s, but throughout the decade, Salinger became more of a hermit and recluse, refusing any and all interviews. Reporters tried staking out places where Salinger was known to shop and eat in an effort to make contact with him. Salinger's last published work was "Hapworth 16, 1924," which appeared in the New Yorker (19 June 1965). The Hapworth story took the form of a letter, found by Buddy Glass, written from camp by a young Seymour Glass. By all accounts Salinger continued to write, sometimes spending weeks at a time in his studio, but he decided not to publish. He even returned a $75,000 advance that Little, Brown, and Company had paid him for a new book of fiction.

Salinger has refused to allow any publication, collected or otherwise, of his work. In 1974 a pirated work, The Complete Uncollected Stories of J. D. Salinger, was published. Salinger called it "a terrible invasion" of his privacy. Then in 1986 he attempted to block the publication of Ian Hamilton's unauthorized biography, stating that Hamilton violated copyright by paraphrasing his letters that recipients had donated to various libraries. In 1988 Hamilton's book was published without the letters.

Biographies of Salinger include Warren French, J. D. Salinger (1963), and J. D. Salinger, Revisited (1988); Ian Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988); and Paul Alexander, Salinger: A Biography (1999). Works on Salinger by his daughter, Margaret Ann Salinger, include Dream Catcher: A Memoir (2000) and Dream Catcher: Reflections on Reclusions (2001).

Lisa A. Ennis

SALINGER, J(erome) D(avid)

Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 1 January 1919. Education: McBurney School, New York, 1932-34; Valley Forge Military Academy, Pennsylvania (editor, Crossed Sabres), 1934-36; New York University, 1937; Ursinus College, Collegetown, Pennsylvania, 1938; Columbia University, New York, 1939. Military Service: Served in the 4th Infantry Division of the United States Army, 1942-45: staff sergeant. Family: Married 1) Sylvia Salinger in 1945 (divorced 1946); 2) Claire Douglas in 1955 (divorced 1967), one daughter and one son. Career: Full-time writer. Has lived in New Hampshire since 1953.

Publications

Short Stories

Nine Stories. 1953; as For Esme-With Love and Squalor and Other Stories, 1953.

Franny and Zooey. 1961.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction. 1963.

Novel

The Catcher in the Rye. 1951.

Bibliography:

Salinger: A Thirty Year Bibliography 1938-1968 by Kenneth Starosciak, privately printed, 1971; Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography 1938-1981 by Jack R. Sublette, 1984.

Critical Studies:

The Fiction of Salinger by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, 1958; Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald, 1962; Salinger and the Critics edited by William F. Belcher and James W. Lee, Belmont, 1962; Salinger by Warren French, 1963, revised edition, 1976, revised edition, as Salinger Revisited, 1988; Studies in Salinger edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, 1963; Salinger by James E. Miller, Jr., 1965; Salinger: A Critical Essay by Kenneth Hamilton, 1967; Zen in the Art of Salinger by Gerald Rosen, 1977; Salinger by James Lundquist, 1979; Salinger's Glass Stories as a Composite Novel by Eberhard Alsen, 1984; In Search of Salinger by Ian Hamilton, 1988; The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence Under Pressure by Sanford Pinsker, 1993.

Although J. D. Salinger has achieved extraordinary fame as the author of The Catcher in the Rye, his successes in the short story form, the form he concedes being most comfortable with, have been no less impressive. Salinger's literary apprenticeship began in earnest when he took Whit Burnett's short story writing course at Columbia University in 1939. Between 1940 and 1953, the year Nine Stories garnered generally enthusiastic reviews, he published 30 stories in journals as various as Cosmopolitan, Collier's, Esquire, and Burnett's own Story magazine, outlets in which formulaic writing was encouraged. These early efforts, none of which deserves to survive on merit, display a distinct gift for limning psychological depths through quirky mannerisms and acute observations even as they pursue conventional plot denouements, usually focusing on conflicts inherent in marital and other family relations. Two of them—"I'm Crazy" and "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," his first New Yorker story—offer crude versions of episodes that would surface in The Catcher in the Rye.

Reflecting the influence of Lardner, Fitzgerald, and especially Hemingway in their penchant for ironic understatement and their haunting consciousness of a universe intent upon crushing frail, romantic sensibilities, Salinger's novice fiction also revealed a fierce need to impose moral dimensions, a genuine spiritual hunger for goodness in a cruel world. The pervasive cruelty, frequently incarnated as insensitive louts thoughtlessly wounding sensitive alter egos, seemed confirmed by Salinger's combat experiences, which triggered a mental breakdown. War became a prime eidolon for narrative indictments of reality's implacable, if banal, onslaughts against his estranged protagonist-victims in stories such as "Last Day of the Last Furlough," "A Boy in France," "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," and "The Stranger," which also played variations on the motif of childhood's redemptive innocence, projecting intense concern over a younger sibling as a possible casualty or savior figure.

Another major theme, which exhibited traits of a very American, almost prepubescent distrust of women and sex, emerged in "The Inverted Forest" (1947), a long (24, 000 words), archly symbolic reification of the eternal battle between art and the artist and the opposing thrust of love and marriage. More important, Salinger had located his mature voice and means, a deft fusion of satire, educated conversation, and sparse naturalistic details in search of Joycean epiphanies amid an urbane upper-middle-class scene nearest to his own Manhattan nurture. A year later he signed an exclusive contract with The New Yorker that both signaled his artistic arrival and helped refine his talent for exploring subtle emotional complexities.

All but two of the tales in Nine Stories debuted in The New Yorker, and this ruthlessly select harvest of fictions showcased Salinger at the peak of his considerable powers. Three of the stories—"A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," and "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor"—have entered the canon, and the book has had a significant cumulative impact. James Lundquist and others have outlined the Zen Buddhist dynamic governing Nine Stories, which is prefaced by the koan "one hand clapping," but they appear insufficiently aware that the tension and consequent strength of its best stories stem precisely from unresolved struggles between the desired Zen transcendence of self and obdurate neuroses.

In the Esmé story, for instance, Salinger's surest masterpiece, the brilliant manipulation of a familiar crisis—a devastated soldier finds an escape from his Dostoevskian hell through the kindness of a precocious girl—climaxes in a moment of karma that sidesteps the darker issue of the protagonist's patent narcissistic fixation. Similarly, the suicide of Seymour Glass at the conclusion of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" savagely contradicts the Zen perspective established by his interaction with the little girl on the beach, the banana fish allegory working equally well with a Freudian reading of his pathological condition and pedophilic excitement.

Salinger's aesthetic judgment deteriorated steadily after the publication of Nine Stories as he became obsessed with chronicling the Glass family, with fiction and autobiography perilously enmeshed in several lengthy stories. The pair in Franny and Zooey follow Franny Glass to her sad collapse in a restaurant ladies' room, stimulating much critical discussion about a possible pregnancy, only to have her saved from a dangerous depression by Zooey, her brother Zachary, who phones her from their brother Seymour's room to suggest that Jesus Christ can be anyone. The next two installments in the Glass saga comprise Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction, but the bathetic nadir came with the 1965 publication of "Hapworth 16, 1965" in The New Yorker, a tedious, self-indulgent letter from Seymour, age seven, at summer camp introduced by his brother Buddy. The essential distance between creator and creation had narrowed to the point of art's near extinction—the story terminating with a list of Seymour's favorite books—and Salinger's subsequent public silence.

—Edward Butscher

See the essay on "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

SALINGER, J(erome) D(avid)

SALINGER, J(erome) D(avid). American, b. 1919. Genres: Novels, Novellas/Short stories. Publications: The Catcher in the Rye (novel), 1951; Nine Stories (in U.K. as For Esme-With Love and Squalor and Other Stories), 1953; Franny and Zooey (short stories), 1961; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction, 1963. Address: c/o Harold Ober Assocs, 425 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10017, U.S.A.