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Short story by J. D. Salinger From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“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" | |
---|---|
Short story by J. D. Salinger | |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publication | |
Published in | Story |
Publication date | March–April 1940 |
“The Young Folks” is Salinger's first published story.[3][4]
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]
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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]
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