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Professionally, 1955 was a very productive year. Salinger spent its opening days putting the final polish on “Franny” before its release and immediately afterward began to pen a ninety-page novella that would prove seminal in his body of work, a story through which many of his past efforts would converge to blaze a new path for his writings: “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” the first true saga of the Glass family.

Salinger worked tirelessly on the story for most of the year. He paid the novella a devotion that he had not employed since The Catcher in the Rye. It was continually reworked, refined, and “compressed” until it reached a quality and size that The New Yorker would accommodate.* This process seldom involved Gus Lobrano, whose health was beginning to fail. Instead, Salinger collaborated with the magazine’s editor (and Lobrano’s nemesis), William Shawn. For all of Shawn’s eccentricities, he was universally praised as being a brilliant editor whose contribution could make the most lackluster of works shine. For months, he and Salinger secluded themselves in Shawn’s New Yorker office and worked on the story. When it was finally completed in November, “Carpenters” bypassed the normal process of evaluation by the magazine’s editorial staff (the same assessors who had so misinterpreted “Franny”) and went directly to publication.

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The opening pages of “Carpenters” are exquisite. In them, the narrator recalls a night that occurred twenty years earlier, when his ten-month-old sister was moved into the room that he and his brother shared as teenagers. When the child began to cry during the night, his brother calmed her by reading an ancient Taoist tale of a Chinese duke who sends a seemingly ordinary vegetable hawker on an impossible quest for the perfect steed. When the hawker proves himself incapable of distinguishing even the horse’s sex or color, the duke becomes dismayed. How can such a man be a judge of quality? Yet, when the horse arrives, it proves to be the most superior of animals. Chiu-fang Kao, the lowly vegetable hawker, had chosen it by perceiving its spiritual essence and ignoring its outer details.

With a masterful tenderness, this opening passage gently shepherds the reader into the fold of Salinger’s imaginary world. His ability to draw the reader into his work, a maneuver whose gentleness seemed to have been refined with each previous story, reached its summit in “Carpenters.” Through the story’s first lines, the yet-unknown narrator reintroduces the reader to two characters who are already familiar: Franny, the distressed protagonist of Salinger’s most recent work, and Seymour, the tragic hero of the celebrated “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The reader’s feelings of intimacy and comfort with these characters are immediate, and the short story that the narrator tells of his brother Seymour reading a Taoist tale to the infant Franny is sublime.

A collision with reality soon follows. Readers are quickly reminded that Seymour, now understood to be exceptional in wisdom, perception, and kindness, is actually dead. But it is too late for them to retreat; they have already entered the matrix of Salinger’s craft. Fixed there, their sympathies are instinctively delivered to the storyteller, who lays bare his grief over Seymour’s death. This grief attaches a bittersweet quality to the Taoist tale. “Such a man [as the insightful vegetable hawker], gifted with the eye for the core of reality, was Seymour,” he mourns. And since Seymour’s suicide in a Florida resort seven years before, the narrator has been unable “to think of anybody whom I’d care to send out to look for horses in his stead.” The storyteller of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is Seymour’s younger brother, Buddy Glass, and when Seymour’s tale of the duke and Kao ends, it is Buddy’s tale that begins.

Buddy’s story takes place on the day of Seymour’s wedding during the Second World War, in June 1942, and is the first story he narrates. After reintroducing