This is 1979, and it has been twenty-eight years since Holden Caulfield dragged his deer-hunting cap and his prep-school heart through Manhattan. But J. D. Salinger's ideas on the true and the false in American culture, his religious solutions to the crises of alienation and isolation, and his overriding sentimentality may have had more impact on the American brainscape than anyone yet has taken into account. Since the publication of a long story, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in The New Yorker in 1965, Salinger has maintained a silence that has turned him into the Howard Hughes of American literature. But Salinger's lasting significance has not declined. The startling thing for many of us to realize is that the confidential ravings of Holden Caulfield, the enigma of Seymour Glass's suicide, and the pathetic pragmatism of the Jesus Prayer embraced by Franny Glass, remain part of our consciousness—and it is not just simply nostalgia for that time in the 1950s and early 1960s when Salinger's characters provided just about the only voices that did not sound phony. As a whole new generation of readers indicates, the appeal of his work is enduring. His influence remains, and we cannot get around it, perhaps cannot get over it. (p. 1)
Looking back, one can now discern at least four phases in Salinger's career. His early stories generally portray characters who feel estranged and marooned because of World War II. His second phase is represented by The Catcher in the Rye, and Salinger's attempt in that book to deal with estrangement and isolation through a Zen-inspired awakening and lonely benevolence. The third phase, seen in Nine Stories, involves bringing together the principles of Zen art and the tradition of the short story. The fourth phase is one in which Salinger's work becomes more and more experimental, resulting in the philosophical mood of his last two books, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction. These four phases indicate that Salinger should be read as a writer who is seeking solutions, as a writer who is trying to give direction to his thought based on an initial disturbing event. And that event is World War II.
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