Franny and Zooey Study Guide

J. D. Salinger was born in 1919 in New York City. After graduating high school in 1936, Salinger matriculated into New York University but dropped out in his first year. In 1938, he briefly attended Ursinus College in Pennsylvania before dropping out again. Finally, in 1939, he matriculated into Columbia University, where he studied fiction writing. In 1942, the U.S. Army drafted Salinger. He participated in the Normandy landings (D-Day), the Ardennes Offensive (the Battle of the Bulge), and the liberation of the concentration camp Dachau. After the war, he was briefly hospitalized for what was called “combat stress reaction” at the time, indicating the toll his military experiences took on him. He published his acclaimed story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in The New Yorker in 1948. This story introduced his readers to the Glass family, who appeared in more than half a dozen subsequent Salinger works, including Franny and Zooey. In 1951, Salinger published his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which became a controversial bestseller. Though he continued to publish works such as Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961), he moved to a small town in New Hampshire and became famously reclusive. He died in 2010.

In Franny and Zooey, which takes place in 1955, the titular protagonists Franny and Zooey Glass are haunted by the deaths of their older brothers Seymour and Walt. Both Seymour and Walt served in the U.S. military during World War II (1939–1945), a global conflict fought between the Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and others) and the Allies (the U.K., the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and others). Seymour died by suicide after returning home from the war, while Walt died in an accident during the U.S. Army’s occupation of Japan, which lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until 1952. The war trauma that haunts the Glass family may have derived from author J.D. Salinger’s own experiences during World War II. Salinger saw action during D-Day—which initiated the liberation of France from Nazi German occupation—and during the Battle of the Bulge, when Nazis attacked the Allies in the Ardennes (a region in Belgium and Luxembourg). He also entered the Nazi German concentration camp Dachau, where the Nazis murdered more than 40,000 people, many of whom were killed because they were ethnically Jewish. This experience may have been especially traumatic for Salinger, who was himself from a Jewish family.

The protagonists of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961) are the two youngest siblings in the Glass family. Salinger first introduced readers to the Glass family in his 1948 short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The Glass family subsequently appeared in his short story collection Nine Stories (1953) and his novellas Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters (1955) and Seymour: An Introduction (1959). Like J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey explores themes of inauthenticity, materialism, and alienation in the lives of young American characters. Franny and Zooey’s religious themes were clearly influenced by the Russian work The Way of A Pilgrim by Michael Kozlov and Arsenius Troyepolsky. The book was first published in Russian in 1884 and in English in 1930. The work follows the narrative of a poor peasant pilgrim seeking to pray the Jesus Prayer unceasingly. Both of Franny and Zooey’s titular protagonists have read the work, and Franny attempts to imitate the monk’s unceasing prayer at points. Meanwhile, Franny and Zooey’s representation of Americans alienated by U.S. culture’s materialism and spiritual sterility may have been influenced by the representation of the same themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, especially The Great Gatsby (1925).