![]() ![]() He moved to Cornish, New Hampshire in 1953 a year later, he married Claire Douglass, who bore two children, Margaret Ann and Matthew, before her divorce from Salinger in 1967. ![]() In 1951, Salinger's most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye, was published. Salinger hated the film and, to this day, there have been no major film (or stage) adaptations of his work. In 1950, the first (and only) film treatment of a Salinger work premiered: a version of "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut" renamed My Foolish Heart. Other works that followed were the stories "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," "The Laughing Man," and "For Esme-With Love and Squalor," all of which were later collected in the book Nine Stories (1953). They divorced eight months later, after Salinger had brought her to the United States she returned to Europe, where she practically disappeared from later biographers.ĭespite his failed marriage, Salinger's career as a writer now gained momentum and he enjoyed a long relationship with the New Yorker, the magazine that would publish a number of his stories and longer works: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" was first published in the Januissue. ![]() That same year, he married his first wife, Sylvia, a woman about whom very little is known. In 1945, Salinger suffered some sort of breakdown or illness as a result of the war (the details are unclear) and spent some time at an Army hospital in Nuremberg. Salinger served with the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps before participating in the 1944 DDay invasion, where he landed at Utah Beach. Salinger then sold a number of stories (many now uncollected) to magazines such as Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire before he was drafted by the United States Army in 1942. The following year, he took a course at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine Salinger's first piece of fiction, "The Young Folks," impressed Burnett, who published it in a 1940 issue of Story. After only one semester, however, he dropped out. His failing grades, however, prompted his parents to send him (in 1934) to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, where he edited his class's yearbook and from which he graduated in 1936.Īfter a brief tour of Europe, Salinger enrolled in Ursinus College in the fall of 1938. In 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue (as a result of Solomon's success) and Salinger was enrolled at the McBurney School, a private school in Manhattan where he (like his most famous creation, Holden Caulfield) managed the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper and acted in some drama productions. His father, Solomon, was a Jewish cheese importer who hoped that his son would eventually learn his business his mother, Marie Jillich, was an Irish Catholic whose parents disowned her when she eloped with Solomon. Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on New Year's Day, 1919. Regardless of what specific motive a reader assigns to Seymour's suicide, he or she is sure to be involved in Salinger's elaborate game of symbols, colors, and other indirect means of storytelling. #A perfect day for bananafish symbols professionalMultiple interpretations are possible, which makes the story's meaning ripe for debate, a much-disputed point for both professional critics and casual fans. Also plausible is the idea that Seymour is like the bananafish he describes: a man so glutted (with horror or pleasure) that he can no longer survive. Others view Seymour as something of a guru, a man wise enough to know that his world can only corrupt him and who, therefore, escapes from it. Some readers find Seymour's wife, Muriel, partially to blame, as her self-interest seems to overshadow what should be her wifely concern for her troubled husband. This apparent lack of motive is at the heart of the critical debate on the story. However, his suicide in the story's final paragraph shocks most readers and then leaves them scratching their heads, trying to understand why, exactly, Seymour pulled the trigger. The reader of "Bananafish" learns that Seymour, a veteran of World War II, has had trouble readjusting to civilian life-an understandable problem that thousands of soldiers had to face. Seymour, the oldest of the Glass children, is Salinger's main character in one of his most elusive pieces of writing. The story is the first concerning a member of the fictional Glass family Salinger created, whose members figure in much of his work. ![]() "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" first appeared in the January 31, 1948, issue of the New Yorker and was collected as the first piece in Nine Stories (1953). A Perfect Day for Bananafish Introduction ![]()
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