J.d. Salinger Essay -- essays research papers

Born on January 1, 1919, Jerome David Salinger was to become one of Americas great contemporary authors. In 1938 Salinger briefly attended Ursinus College in Pennsylvania where he wrote a column, "Skipped Diploma," which featured movie reviews for his college newspaper. Salinger made his writing debut when he promulgated his first short story, "The Young Folks," in Whit Burnetts Story magazine (French, xiii). He was paid only twenty-five dollars. In 1939, at the sequence of 20, Salinger had not acquired any readers. He later enrolled in a creative writing class at Columbia University. Salinger was very much interested in becoming an actor and a playwright, which was quite odd because he would later in life become a recluse (Wenke, 3). Salinger adjusted his writing means to fit the literary marketplace. He was writing for money and began writing for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle. Many of Salingers characters cast off unique character traits. &q uotSalinger presents a number of stories that consider characters who become involved in degrading, often phony social contexts," states a major critic (Wenke, 7). These characters be often young and have experienced a lot of emotional turmoil. They have been rejected by society and mainly categorized as "misfits." This alienation of the personality is often viewed as a sign of weakness by society when in fact the outcasts ultimately gain strength from their experiences as shown in Nine Stories, The Catcher in the Rye, and Franny and Zooey. Salinger is telling a tale of the human condition in its reality through his novels. Nine Stories is a collection of short stories of people who are uncertain of the next path to take in life. They are lonely, needy, and searching for esteem. One of these stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," is the story of a young couple who try on to understand their life together and the true meaning of love. Seymour Glass has just been released from the Army Hospital and he is unable to adjust to life with his "crass married woman Muriel amidst the lavish and vulgar atmosphere of their post-war second honeymoon" (Gwynn & Blotner, 19). It has often been called "the loveless tunnel of love." Salinger portrays Muriel in the first part of the story as superficial. ... ...at eliminate us to believe that life has leading characters and minor characters, important details and unimportant details, beginnings, middles, ends" (Bryfonski, 521). Many critics acclaim that Nine Stories and The Catcher in The Rye are Salingers most famous and important works (Bryfonski, 521). The Glass family saga starting in Nine Stories and continuing in and ending in Franny and Zooey shows how the lack of love and the influence of society can lead to destruction unless you find enough inner strength to rise above it. Many of Salingers characters are attached to other fictional characters by other authors. In The Catcher in The Rye, the young Holden Caulfield is compared by critics to Huckleberry Finn He has a colloquialism as marked as HucksLike Huck, Holden is neither comical or misanthrope. He is an observer. Unlike Huck, he makes judgements by the dozen, but these are not to be interpreted seriously they are concepts (Lomazoff, 7). Holden is also compared to Hamlet but to a lesser degree they are both not totally in the minds. The majority of Salingers characters learn from being alienated. Through learning this one aspect, they gain strength from it to move on.