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The most difficult genre is the short story. There is no 100-page warm-up. There is no carefully planting seeds that will take shape 75 pages later.

And it is almost an impossible task to stir up the soul while being limited to so few words and an even more daunting task if the author isn’t going to resort to cheap tricks for sympathy but rather earning those tears and emotions.

Salinger certainly delivers. And these stores are distinctly Salinger from the use of italics to the abundant use of dialogue to the sea of memorable quotes even before the age of Twitter and Instagram. These stories almost pulse with a backstory, begging to be told, leaving the reader always desperately hungry for more. And the whisper of F. Scott Fitzgerald can be heard faintly if you lean into this work. For example, in For Esme �� With Love and Squalor, Esme says, “I’m quite communicative for my age.�� ‘Communicative�� isn’t a word that naturally rolls off the tongue. Yet, it is vaguely familiar, because this word appears in the third sentence of The Great Gatsby, “He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way…��.

Additionally, as part of the study The American Novel Since 1945, we read Salinger’s Franny and Zooey who are part of The Glass Family. Nine Stories includes more adventures with The Glass Family, going into greater depth with siblings Seymour, Boo Boo, and Walt.

Although the two most famous stories are A Perfect Day for Bananafish and For Esme �� With Love and Squalor, my two favorite stories are the last two �� De-Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period and Teddy.

De-Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period is about a young man who becomes an art instructor at a correspondence art school. The vibes. The ambiance. It is laugh-out-loud funny. There is also mention of a dummy, and I wonder if this was the creative seed that planted the dummy in A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

Teddy appears to be a precursor to Franny and Zooey as there are parallels between the two works, for example, the use of confined spaces and discussion of meditation, emptying the mind, and education. Page 297, “It’s time for him to take everything out of his head instead of putting more stuff in,�� parallels page 65 of Franny and Zooey, “…education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter if it didn’t begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge.��

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text �� $89.40 for a 2010 Boxed Set of Hardcover Salinger Books on Mercari

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