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On December 3, recovered to health and feeling the need to escape the clamor of the city, Salinger reported to Gus Lobrano that he was going away for a few weeks in an attempt to finish a story. It was a trip he would never take.

Despite his returning to work and making plans for the following year, Harold Ross’s health worsened. Traveling to Boston, Ross consigned himself to the New England Baptist Hospital, where he underwent exploratory surgery on December 6. Surgeons found that a large tumor had enveloped his right lung, and, while they deliberated what to do, Ross died on the operating table.

Salinger was staggered by the news. His affection for Ross had been absolute. On December 10, he attended the funeral with the entire New Yorker “family.” Besides their shock and grief over the loss of their leader, there was a feeling of apprehension. Ross’s death had been unexpected, and he had not named a successor. Among the mourners, two names were whispered as likely candidates to head the magazine. Foremost was Salinger’s own editor, Gus Lobrano. The other was William Shawn, who had been on the New Yorker staff since 1933.

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Salinger would never again attain the level of productivity he had achieved in 1948. He spent most of 1951 wrestling with “De Daumier–Smith’s Blue Period,” the only story he is known to have written that year. Salinger claimed to have worked on the piece for five months, but it actually took far longer.

It appears that Salinger began writing the story soon after the rejection of “Requiem for the Phantom of the Opera” in January 1951. The first available reference to the story is contained in an undated letter to Gus Lobrano.* Just before Salinger left for Britain on May 8, Lobrano had taken him to lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, where they had discussed the story. Salinger had then rushed home to complete the piece, which he had promised to deliver to Lobrano the previous Saturday and was now late.

Upon submitting the story, Salinger told Lobrano that he was uncertain of it. He considered it long and meandering and was afraid readers might find it “offensive.”12 Lobrano not only agreed, he also thought the story “bizarre.” His final rejection letter did not appear until November 14, but it is probable that Salinger had already ineffectively reworked and resubmitted it before its rejection.

According to Lobrano, “the piece wasn’t successful as a short story, perhaps because the idea and characterization were too complex for so much compression.”13 The New Yorker commonly used the term “compression” to indicate that a story needed to be shortened. Salinger spent innumerable months during his career “compressing” his stories to acceptable New Yorker length. Lobrano’s use of the word in this letter helps to explain why Salinger had worked on the story for so long. Salinger responded to Lobrano the next day. He told the editor that he wouldn’t protest the rejection but would go on to another story instead.14 Yet his resentment was palpable in his reply, and despite his claiming otherwise, it was clear that he was unwilling to give up on it regardless of The New Yorker’s verdict. Still chafing at the rebuff on December 11, Salinger shared his disappointment with Jamie Hamilton. Rather than shelve the story, Salinger told him he was debating adding it to a collection or even expanding it into a novel.

It was likely Hamilton who came to Salinger’s aid. “De Daumier–Smith’s Blue Period” was published the following May, not in The New Yorker or any other American magazine but in the British World Review, the same publication in which Hamilton had first read “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Not only was “De Daumier–Smith” the last Salinger story ever to appear outside the pages of The New Yorker, it is the only story initially published outside the United States.

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After The Catcher in the Rye, the aim of Salinger’s ambition shifted and he devoted himself to crafting fiction embedded with religion, stories that exposed the spiritual emptiness inherent in American