"The Young Folks"
Short story by J. D. Salinger
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Publication
Published inStory
Publication dateMarch–April 1940

“The Young Folks” is a work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger published in the March–April 1940 issue of Story magazine. The story is included in the 2014 Salinger collection Three Early Stories.[1][2]

“The Young Folks” is Salinger's first published story.[3][4]

Plot

The story takes place at a New York cocktail party and details the emptiness of the conversation between a young woman and a male college student.[5][6]

Style and Theme

Literary critic John Wenke characterizes “The Young Folk” as a critique of “social manners” in which Salinger “depicts a sterile world populated by petty people” - a world of social elites of which he was a member.[7] Biographer Kenneth Slawenski notes the influence of one of Salinger's contemporaries who died the year that the story was published:

The story satirizes characters very much like himself and the people that he knew: upper-class college students obsessed with the petty details of their own shallow lives. It was characteristic of its time and heavily influenced by the writing style of F. Scott Fitzgerald.[8]

Slawenski adds that “rather than depicting affluent young lives an enviable, ‘The Young Folks’ shone a stark spotlight on the unglamorous truths of upper-class society, exposing the emptiness and unromantic realities of their existence...”[9]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Slawenski, 2010 p. 36
  2. ↑ Wenke, 1991 p. 166: Selected Bibliography
  3. ↑ Wenke, 1991 p. 124: “...Salinger’s first published story…”
  4. ↑ Slawenski, 2010 p. 86
  5. ↑ Wenke, 1991 p. 4-5: Plot sketch
  6. ↑ Slawenski, 2010 p. 32: Plot sketch
  7. ↑ Wenke, 1991 p. 4, p. 6
  8. ↑ Slawenski, 2010 p. 32: quoted material, And p. 36: Death of Fitzgerald at age 44 in 1940
  9. ↑ Slawenski, 2010 p. 32

Sources

  • Slawenski, Kenneth. 2010. J. D. Salinger: A Life. Random House, New York. ISBN 978-1-4000-6951-4
  • Wenke, John. 1991. J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twaynes Studies in Short Fiction, Gordon Weaver, General Editor. Twayne Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-8057-8334-2
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