The entire body of writing by which Jerome David Salinger wishes to be known is contained in four small books--one novel and thirteen short stories. All of these were published in the eleven-and-a-half years between January 1948 and June 1959; and all but the novel and two of the stories originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Yet despite this limited body of work, Salinger remained for at least a dozen years, from 1951 to 1963, the most popular American fiction writer with serious high-school and college students, as well as many adults alienated by the stultifying conformity of the Eisenhower years; and his few publications elicited an enormous body of criticism. Few writers have developed such a major reputation for such a small body of work, largely from a single magazine noted for its rigid formulae and chic appeal to the highly educated, upper middle class (especially since Salinger's fiction is...