Franny And Zooey

In the toils of the Glass family and their utilitarian lifestyle lay two children. Franny is the youngest, away at school and slowly giving into doubts about the meaning of life. She becomes obsessed with a book that prompts her to pray away the ills of her life, only to fall victim to a nervous breakdown. Back at home, Zooey, the eldest brother in the family of seven, is worried sick over the state if his little sister. He is all too familiar with the way she feels, so much so that he feels impelled to explain to her the alienation as he tries to bring her around with a virtuous lecture on life. J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey is a keen take on life from two mutated perspectives. At once dark and witty, it's as provocative as it is entertaining.

The author writes: FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by ZOOEY. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I''m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambiguous one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose that sooner or later I''ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I''m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I''ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.

More than 20 years of seclusion and silence have taken their toll on J. D. Salinger's literary reputation, but the impact made by The Catcher in The Rye (1951) and the Glass family stories was deep enough to make a lasting impression and to assure his continued readership. Salinger was born in New York City of Jewish and Scottish-Irish extraction. He attended Manhattan public schools, a military academy in Pennsylvania, and three colleges, but received no degrees. "A happy tourist's year in Europe," he wrote in 1955, "when I was eighteen and nineteen. In the Army from '42 to '46, most of the time with the Fourth Division. . . . I've been writing since I was fifteen or so. My short stories have appeared in a number of magazines over the last ten years, mostly---and most happily---in the New Yorker. I worked on "The "Catcher in the Rye,' on and off, for ten years" (Twentieth Century Authors). "Remarkable and absorb-ing . . . profoundly moving . . . magic," Harrison Smith called this story. The Catcher has been an extremely popular book among young people ever since its appearance and has brought Salinger an international reputation. Franny and Zooey (1961) is composed of two long New Yorker stories, which appeared in 1955 and 1957, recording a significant weekend in the lives of Franny Glass, a troubled 20-year-old college student, and her brother Zooey, a television actor. Raise High the Roof Beam, (1963) is another story of the Glass family. There are seven Glass children, "two of whom are now dead and all of whom were child prodigies." Salinger gradually withdrew from public life and the literary scene during the 1950s. He had discovered Zen during his days in Greenwich Village after the war, and that philosophy may have encouraged his deeper immersion in meditation and writing. Unfortunately, however, Salinger's withdrawal has not led to increased creativity---at least not visibly. As of 1992, his years of seclusion since 1963 had produced only silence, and his critical reputation, which peaked in the early 1960s, has suffered accordingly. The Catcher in the Rye, however, remains a standard text in high school and college classrooms, and a loyal following of readers continues to hope for a continuation of the Glass family saga. They feel that, when and if that work is completed, it will be one of the masterworks of twentieth-century fiction. Salinger now lives a somewhat reclusive life in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he may still be writing. He has occasionally been involved in lawsuits concerning unauthorized use of his writings.