Book Description
The author writes: Franny came out in The New Yorker
The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Volume containing two interrelated stories by J.D. Salinger, published in book form in 1961. The stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger's short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the "Jesus prayer" as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the "Jesus prayer" is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails.
Franny and Zooey FROM THE CRITICS
New York Times
I am one of those...for whom Salinger's work dawned as something of a revelation. I expect that further revelations are to come. The Glass saga, as he has sketched it out, potentially contains great fiction...the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of as all.—Books of the Century, The New York Times review September, 1961
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