Nine Stories Reading Order

J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories (1953) is one of the great American story collections — containing 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,' 'For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,' 'The Laughing Man,' and five others that collectively introduce the Glass family world and the Salinger preoccupations with spiritual authenticity, wartime trauma, and childhood innocence that The Catcher in the Rye had established two years earlier. 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' introduces Seymour Glass (his suicide), while 'Down at the Dinghy' and 'Teddy' introduce other preoccupations that flower in Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963). Each story was first published in The New Yorker between 1948 and 1953; this is Salinger's only story collection.