J.b. Salinger s A Perfect Day For Bananafish

Matthew Silbernagel Ms. Clark English III 30 November 2015 J.D. Salinger her was born in New York City in 1919. He wrote in the post war time period where writers wrote mostly about aesthetic or social rather than political problems. J.D. Salinger is the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother. After enrollment at both NYU and Columbia University he devoted himself to writing and by 1940 he had published some short stories. But his career as a writer was interrupted by World War II. He was drafted into the war in 1942 and was moved to the Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1943. The next year he trained in England, joined the American Army’s Fourth Division, and landed at Utah Beach on D-Day. He then served in five European campaigns as Security Agent for the Twelfth Infantry Regiment. After the war he started his writing career back up for the New Yorker. Some of his most popular stories include his first story for The New Yorker, A Perfect Day for Bananafish which is about the suicide of a veteran and For Esmà © With Love and Squalor which describes a U.S. soldier s meeting with two British kids. He has published a total of thirty five short stories including many in The Saturday Evening Post, Story, and Colliers between 1940 and 1948 and in The New Yorker from 1948 to 1965. He was also very interested in Zen Buddhism, Hindu-Buddhism, and other Eastern beliefs. Buddhism can be found throughout Nine Stories in the book s closing story Teddy. He also was a