Word: yorkers
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...never heard of The New Yorker. We never knew anything about how Salinger lived in New Hampshire and was a hermit. We couldn’t have cared less, either or, we’d only have liked that about him, the secrecy. I always figured he was dead, gone the way of Seymour. Everyone whose books I liked was dead. I didn’t want to meet him. I just loved him, the stories...
...first of that early trifecta of New Yorker stories was "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which we first meet Seymour, the eldest of the Glass children. It's the last day of his life, and he appears in just the final pages, talking with a little girl on a beach in Florida - one of the many radiant children in Salinger's work - and bringing her out into the ocean in a fond but also slightly dangerous way, and then returning to the hotel room where his new bride, who has been on the phone earlier assuring her mother that...
That brutal finale made Salinger a sensation in literary circles. By that time Salinger, too, was becoming a man who could not abide the world. The producer Darryl Zanuck bought the screen rights to another of Salinger's New Yorker stories, "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," about a suburban housewife who dissolves into self-pity during an afternoon of drinking with an old school chum. Zanuck had it rewritten as a throbbing melodrama with Susan Hayward that was released under the title My Foolish Heart. The whole thing made Salinger cringe...
...They were married in 1955, but not before Douglas, having already met Salinger, abruptly entered a brief marriage to a graduate of the Harvard Business School, then fled back to Salinger. Salinger poured his feelings about that relationship into a long short story that was published in the New Yorker two weeks before their wedding. "Franny" is about one of the Glass sisters who realizes that she can't abide the jerk she's dating, a smug young Ivy League academic, and flees to the bathroom of a restaurant where they're eating to seek the refuge of an endlessly...
...whatever reason, Salinger published just one more book, combining "Carpenters" and "Seymour," in 1963, though in a foreword he promised readers that more Glass stories were under way. Two years later there was that final long story in the New Yorker, called "Hapworth 16, 1924," which purports to be a letter home from summer camp by a wildly precocious 7-year-old Seymour. After that, the signal shuts down. Salinger was occasionally spotted in public but spoke publicly only on rare occasions...