THERE were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon fill almost two-thirty to get her call ...

Twenty-one years ago in the LRB, Julian Barnes accused J.D. Salinger's erstwhile biographer, Ian Hamilton, of 'reverse reductivism': 'Normally, the biographer establishes the course of a writer’s life ...

If you find yourself relating to any of the characters in J.D. Salinger’s short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” you’d better hope it’s the bananafish, not the humans. For those who aren’t ...

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and coming of age in the 1950s. The story is about Seymour Glass, the eldest child of the Glass family—Franny and Zooey of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey are his siblings.