SOURCE: Prigozy, Ruth. “Nine Stories: J. D. Salinger's Linked Mysteries.” In Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy, pp. 114-32. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Prigozy discusses the unifying elements of the narratives in Salinger's Nine Stories.

From its publication in April 1953, through the heyday of “the Salinger industry” in the 1960s, and intermittently through the 1970s and 1980s, J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories has proven an unusually seductive text for critical theorizing.¹ Indeed, even those most devoted to Salinger studies, after the first burst of scholarly enthusiasm, welcomed a moratorium on further efforts to interpret Salinger's oeuvre, including this collection for which there apparently could be no final word. What is most striking, after thirty years of critical attention, are the contradictory, even antipodal responses to each of the collected stories. At the heart of...