John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

World War II[edit]

In 1942, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite finding her immeasurably self-absorbed (he confided to a friend that "Little Oona's hopelessly in love with little Oona"), he called her often and wrote her long letters.^[25] Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married.^[26] In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly a performer.^[27]

The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. The magazine rejected seven of his stories that year, including "Lunch for Three," "Monologue for a Watery Highball," and "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler." But in December 1941, it accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison," a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war jitters".^[28] When Japan carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered "unpublishable." Salinger was devastated. The story appeared in The New Yorker in 1946.^[28] In the spring of 1942, several months after the U.S. entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the army, where he saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division.^[27] He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.^[29][30]

During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was then working as a war correspondent in Paris.^[31] Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona.^[32] Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent."^[2] The two began corresponding; Salinger wrote to Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war,^[32] and added that he was working on a play about Caulfield and hoped to play the part himself.^[32]

Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit also known as the Ritchie Boys, in which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war.^[33] In April 1945 he entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant^[34] and served in five campaigns.^[35] His war experiences affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated,^[36][37] and later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."^[33] Both his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories,^[38] such as "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor", which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, publishing several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker, but with little success; it rejected all of his submissions from 1944 to 1946, including a group of 15 poems in 1945.^[28]