At this time Salinger, who had been attending public schools, was enrolled at the fashionable and respected McBurney School in Manhattan. His grades there were below average, and in September 1934 he was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. There he acted in school plays, edited the 1935-1936 class yearbook, and even wrote the lyrics for a quite conventional class song. He also began writing short stories.
None of the stories Salinger wrote at Valley Forge is known to survive, nor are there any from the three years immediately following his graduation in 1936. During that time he drifted. He spent late 1937 and early 1938 in Europe, mainly in Vienna, learning the importing business. After Germany invaded Austria in March 1938, he returned to the United States and enrolled at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, where he spent one desultory semester in 1938-1939, writing vignettes and brief movie reviews for campus publications. He did not break into a professional writing career until spring 1939, when he enrolled in an evening class in short-story writing taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of the influential Story magazine, at Columbia University.
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