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’s appetite for Hollywood conclusively. He never again considered relinquishing any of his stories to film producers or stage directors. From that point on, he would guard each of his works as jealously as he protected The Catcher in the Rye, in whose defense he had never wavered. In the same letter that declines “The Laughing Man,” Wald continued to appeal for the rights to Catcher. “Will you please convey to Mr. Salinger,” he implored Swanson, “that I am still interested in his brilliant Catcher in the Rye. I wish there was something I could do to convince him that it should be brought to the screen.” Considering other products of Wald’s résumé (the producer was working on an adaptation of Peyton Place at the time) and his intention to interpret “The Laughing Man” as a comedy, the rejection fortuitously saved both the story and its author from almost certain humiliation.

Once he had completed “Zooey,” Salinger determined to reunite with his wife and child. During the first days of May 1957, he traveled again to New York, where Claire and Peggy were living in an apartment paid for by Claire’s stepfather. After delivering the now-finished “Zooey” to William Shawn, Salinger sought out Claire to try to convince her to return with him to Cornish. Claire was apprehensive, but three times a week she had been seeing a psychiatrist, who encouraged her to enter into a dialogue with her husband.

Meeting with Salinger, Claire delivered a series of demands before she would consider reconciliation. Salinger was to spend more time with her and Peggy. When he was away at work, she and the baby were to be allowed frequent visitors. The cottage was to be renovated and expanded. A nursery was to be added. The grounds were to be manicured and redesigned to provide a playground. Above all, she insisted upon the freedom to travel, not just to New York when Salinger needed to meet with his editors but to warmer climates when the winter became oppressive and overseas on long vacations when she became restless.

Salinger agreed to it all and set to work. He hired contractors to build a nursery and gardeners to landscape the grounds.* He promised Claire that they would entertain more often and that he would spend more time with the family. Together, they planned a long vacation to the British Isles, a reproduction of the trip that had so delighted him in 1951 to the country where Claire had spent her childhood. He excitedly wrote to Learned Hand and Jamie Hamilton of their plans to visit Europe. Perhaps, he mused, they would not return to Cornish at all but would settle down in Scotland, a fantasy he had long entertained.

• • •

“Zooey” finally appeared in The New Yorker on May 17, 1957.† From its outset, readers are advised that “Zooey” is not actually a story at all “but a sort of prose home movie.”25 Here is the author’s intention to write “about a stolen pair of sneakers,” a glimpse into the life of the Glass family centering on the two youngest children, Franny and Zooey, just as “Carpenters” had centered on Seymour and Buddy. Expanding the reader’s intimacy with the Glass family consumes much of the novella, but it is soon overwhelmed by Salinger’s compulsion to focus on spiritual issues. The resulting layers of meaning within “Zooey” are also revealed in the opening pages, which warn that “In Zooey, be assured early, we are dealing with the complex, the overlapping, the cloven.”

In October 1945, Salinger told Esquire magazine that he had trouble writing simply and naturally. “My mind is stocked with some black neckties,” he observed, “and though I’m throwing them out as fast as I find them, there will always be a few left over.”26 In 1957, some black neckties remained in Salinger’s writing, but they had transformed themselves from the remnants of literary pretensions to an inclination toward spiritual snobbery that divided the world between the enlightened and the unaware. In “Zooey,” Salinger sought to discard the last of his neckties on both the literary and spiritual levels. Written simply and naturally, “Zooey” attempts to purge Salinger