Salinger, J(erome) D(avid)

Salinger, J[erome] D[avid] (1919– ),New York‐born writer, resident in New Hampshire, began to publish stories in the early 1940s; and after service as an infantry sergeant in Europe during World War II he wrote more stories, but has not chosen to collect them from Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Story, and other journals. His first book was The Catcher in the Rye (1951), about an unhappy teenage boy, Holden Caulfield, who runs away from his boarding school as part of his disgust with “phoniness,” and who because of his feelings and the idiom in which he communicated them became, particularly for a generation of high‐school and college students, a symbol of purity and sensitivity. In Nine Stories (1953), printing stories written beginning in 1948, including A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Salinger introduced his chronicle of an eccentric, warm‐hearted family named Glass, continued in his next books of stories. Franny and Zooey (1961) presents two members of the Glass family, sister and brother, in two long stories. Franny, a college senior, visits her boyfriend on a football weekend which is made desperately unhappy because she is dissatisfied with him, herself, and life. Zooey, her older brother, a television actor, tries to ease her feelings after this weekend, and his sensitive aid is first described by their still older brother, Buddy, whom the author calls his “alter ego.” Raise High the Roof‐Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), a single volume, reprints stories from The New Yorker (1955, 1959), in which Buddy Glass tells, first, of his return to New York during the war to attend his brother Seymour's wedding and of Seymour's jilting of the bride and then of their later elopement; and, second, after Seymour's suicide, of Buddy's own brooding, to the point of breakdown, upon Seymour's virtues, human and literary. In the early 1960s Salinger retired to his rural home, withdrew from the literary scene, and has not published since Hapworth 16, 1924, a story about Seymour aged seven, in The New Yorker (June 19, 1965).