The Art of Literary Thieving: The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, ...

JDS ‘attended several colleges, but he didn’t let the curriculum interfere with his self-imposed study of professional writers’” (53). In other words, across those impressionable years, Salinger had committed himself to learning the writer's craft from the world's best authors.

Throughout his twenties, he was regularly publishing short stories in a handful of popular magazines, such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. By his late twenties, two of his stories appeared in The New Yorker. The second one, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” became, perhaps, his best-known story, adding both to the increasing interest and to the confusion being elicited by his writings. Hamilton believed that this last magazine played an important role in Salinger's development as a writer. “Thanks to The New Yorker he was beginning to learn the pleasures of reader manipulation…He was learning how to leave things out, to flatter and deceive” (Hamilton 1988, 110). This particular story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” deserves a closer look, for it illustrates clearly the tight control that Salinger was achieving over his craft by this time, including his emerging capacity to manipulate and deceive his readers. It illustrates, also, a troublesome challenge posed by this author—one that will be even more evident in The Catcher in the Rye: that his writings may not be adequately grasped unless they are placed in the much larger context of Salinger's own developing life and, particularly, his extensive readings.

In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the main character, Seymour Glass, spends some time on a beach talking with a little girl, Sybil Carpenter, and then goes wading into the ocean with Sybil on a float. When Sybil tells him that she has seen a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth, Seymour kisses the arch of Sybil's foot and takes her back to shore, where they part.