• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

*Salinger’s inference here is that his father had never mentioned that he would be traveling to Poland, a detail that would have given Salinger pause for thought.

*Poland is proud of its connection with Salinger. Plans are under way in Bydgoszcz to honor him with an annual Salinger festival and to place a statue at the site where he worked, which is now a shopping center. According to the Krakow Post newspaper, a design was chosen in 2009 featuring a sculpture of Salinger standing in a patch of living rye.

2. Ambition

Salinger enrolled at Columbia University in January 1939. He signed up for a short-story writing class taught by Whit Burnett, who was also the editor of Story magazine, and a poetry class with the poet-playwright Charles Hanson Towne. Although he had decided to write for a living, Salinger was still unsure of his specific genre. Through his interest in acting, he envisioned himself carving out screenplays, but he was also interested in writing short stories. So, in an attempt to make a decision, he enrolled in both classes, taught by well-known professionals very different from each other in approach and style.

Whit Burnett was a risk taker. He and his then-wife, Martha Foley, had founded Story magazine in Vienna in 1931, during the depths of the Depression. In 1933, the couple moved the operation to New York City, establishing its offices on Fourth Avenue. Under Burnett’s guidance, Story devoted itself to presenting the works of promising young writers, most of whom had been turned away by more conventional and popular magazines. Burnett’s aesthetic instincts were very reliable, and he eventually introduced the world to such authors as Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote. With only a modest circulation of 21,000 in 1939 and always struggling to make ends meet, Story was well respected in literary circles and considered cutting edge for its time.

In contrast to Burnett, Charles Hanson Towne was the epitome of convention. Sixty-one years old when Salinger entered his class, Towne was distinguished in nearly every area of literary undertaking. Professionally, he had been an editor and had successfully led a number of popular magazines, among them Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, and Harper’s Bazaar. Despite his editorial duties, Towne still found time to work on his own writing. The terms “prolific” and “diverse” do not begin to cover the extent of his production. He wrote numerous plays, novels, song lyrics, and even an etiquette manual. Towne’s greatest love, though, was poetry. His poems, like his other endeavors, were successful because they matched readers’ expectations. His poetry always rhymed and used the flowery phrases that contemporary readers anticipated. A typical example of Towne’s style is his 1919 poem “Of One Self-Slain”:

When he went blundering back to God,

His songs half written, his work half done,

Who knows what paths his bruised feet trod,

What hills of peace or pain he won?

I hope God smiled and took his hand,

And said, “Poor truant, passionate fool!

Life’s book is hard to understand:

Why couldst thou not remain at school?”

Exactly what Salinger hoped to learn from such verse is unclear, but it is likely that he was drawn to Towne because of his fame as a playwright and not his reputation as a poet. Towne, however, had chosen to teach poetry at Columbia, forcing Salinger to study an art form in which he had never expressed any serious interest.

Salinger’s enrollment at Columbia was his third attempt at college in as many years, and the stakes were now high. At Ursinus, he had boasted to classmates that he would one day write the Great American Novel. He had even challenged his parents with the demand that he be allowed to attend writing classes in order to fulfill his potential. Yet once the semester began, Salinger was as listless and unfocused as ever. In Burnett’s class, he rarely volunteered, and he produced next to nothing. Instead, as Burnett would often remind Salinger, he spent