Franny and Zooey
Franny and Zooey
Author: J.D. Salinger
Desc: The short story Franny takes place in an unnamed college town and tells the tale of an undergraduate who is becoming disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her. The novella Zooey is named for Zooey Glass the second-youngest member of the Glass family. As his younger sister Franny suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown in her parents' Manhattan living room -- leaving Bessie her mother deeply concerned -- Zooey comes to her aid offering what he thinks is brotherly love understanding and words of sage advice. Salinger writes of these works: "FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955 and was swiftly followed in 1957 by ZOOEY. Both stories are early critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York the Glasses. It is a long-term project patently an ambiguous one and there is a real-enough danger I suppose that sooner or later I'll bog down perhaps disappear entirely in my own methods locutions and mannerisms. On the whole though I'm very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories I've been waiting for them most of my life and I think I have fairly decent monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill."