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

The author writes: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker ? RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR ? An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can''t say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction.

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.