John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Posthumous publications[edit]

Salinger wrote all his life. His widow and son began preparing this work for publication after his death, announcing in 2019 that "all of what he wrote will at some point be shared" but that it was a big job and not yet ready.^[138][139]

Literary style and themes[edit]

In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote, "I almost always write about very young people", a statement that has called his credo.^[140] Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger's work, from his first published story, "The Young Folks" (1940), to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass family stories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young readers, but another was "a consciousness [among youths] that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world."^[141] For this reason, Norman Mailer once remarked that Salinger was "the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school."^[142] Salinger's language, especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was revolutionary at the time his first stories were published and was seen by several critics as "the most distinguishing thing" about his work.^[143]

Salinger identified closely with his characters,^[102] and used techniques such as interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue.

Recurring themes in Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas of innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence of Hollywood and the world at large",^[144] the disconnect between teenagers and "phony" adults,^[144] and the perceptive, precocious intelligence of children.^[38]

Contemporary critics discuss a clear progression over the course of Salinger's published work, as evidenced by the increasingly negative reviews each of his three post-Catcher story collections received.^[134][145] Hamilton adheres to this view, arguing that while Salinger's early stories for the "slicks" boasted "tight, energetic" dialogue, they had also been formulaic and sentimental. It took the standards of The New Yorker editors, among them William Shawn, to refine his writing into the "spare, teasingly mysterious, withheld" qualities of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948), The Catcher in the Rye, and his stories of the early 1950s.^[146] By the late 1950s, as Salinger became more reclusive and involved in religious study, Hamilton notes that his stories became longer, less plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression and parenthetical remarks.^[147] Louis Menand agrees, writing in The New Yorker that Salinger "stopped writing stories, in the conventional sense ... He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control."^[38] In recent years, some critics have defended certain post-Nine Stories works by Salinger; in 2001, Janet Malcolm wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Zooey" "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece ... Rereading it and its companion piece 'Franny' is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby."^[134]