J. D. Salinger - Post-war Years

Post-war Years

After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "Denazification" duty in Germany for the Counterintelligence Corps. He lived in Weissenburg and, soon after, married a woman named Sylvia Welter. He brought her to the United States in April 1946, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and Sylvia returned to Germany. Years later, in 1972, Salinger's daughter Margaret was with him when he received a letter from Sylvia. He looked at the envelope, and without reading it, tore it apart. It was the first time he had heard from her since the breakup, but as Margaret put it, "when he was finished with a person, he was through with them."

In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint. Titled The Young Folks, the collection was to consist of twenty stories—ten, like the title story and "Slight Rebellion off Madison," were already in print; ten were previously unpublished. Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance on its sale, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book. Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.

By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an avid follower of Zen Buddhism, to the point that he "gave reading lists on the subject to his dates" and arranged a meeting with Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki. In 1948, he submitted a short story titled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" to The New Yorker. The magazine was so impressed with "the singular quality of the story" that its editors accepted it for publication immediately, and signed Salinger to a contract that allowed them right of first refusal on any future stories. The critical acclaim accorded "Bananafish," coupled with problems Salinger had with stories being altered by the "slicks," led him to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker. "Bananafish" was also the first of Salinger's published stories to feature the Glasses, a fictional family consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny. Salinger eventually published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.

In the early 1940s, Salinger had confided in a letter to Whit Burnett that he was eager to sell the film rights to some of his stories in order to achieve financial security. According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger was disappointed when "rumblings from Hollywood" over his 1943 short story "The Varioni Brothers" came to nothing. Therefore he immediately agreed when, in mid-1948, independent film producer Samuel Goldwyn offered to buy the film rights to his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut." Though Salinger sold his story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that it "would make a good movie," the film version of "Wiggily" was lambasted by critics upon its release in 1949. Renamed My Foolish Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the melodramatic film departed to such an extent from Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg referred to it as a "bastardization." As a result of this experience, Salinger never again permitted film adaptations to be made from his work. When Brigitte Bardot wanted to buy the rights to "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Salinger refused the request, but told his friend, Lillian Ross, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, "She's a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I'm tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport."