John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Writing in the 1950s and move to Cornish[edit]

In a July 1951 profile in Book of the Month Club News, Salinger's friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell asked Salinger about his literary influences. He replied, "A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge. I won't name any living writers. I don't think it's right" (although O'Casey was in fact alive at the time).^[71] In letters from the 1940s, Salinger expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald;^[72] Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor".^[73] Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" has an ending similar to that of Fitzgerald's story "May Day."^[74]

Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life in 1952, after several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna.^[75] He became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family.^[76][77] Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story "Teddy" features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights.^[78] He also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in "Hapworth 16, 1924", Seymour Glass calls him "one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century."^[76]

In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker (including "Bananafish"), as well as two the magazine had rejected. The collection was published as Nine Stories in the United States, and "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" in the UK, after one of Salinger's best-known stories.^[79] The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—"remarkably so for a volume of short stories," according to Hamilton.^[80] Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.^[80] Already tightening his grip on publicity, Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.^{[citation needed]}

As The Catcher in the Rye's notoriety grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from an apartment at 300 East 57th Street,^[81] New York, to Cornish, New Hampshire. Early in his time at Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with students at Windsor High School. Salinger invited them to his house frequently to play records and talk about problems at school.^[82] One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for the high school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper. After the interview appeared prominently in the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off all contact with the high schoolers without explanation.^[82] He was also seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.^[83] He also began to publish less often. After Nine Stories, he published only four stories in the rest of the decade, two in 1955 and one each in 1957 and 1959.^{[citation needed]}