Salinger, J.D. | Salinger’s Era
Salinger’s Era
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE PREWAR YEARS
During the first ten years of Salinger’s life as a child and schoolboy in New York, the American economy was enjoying a bull market that seemed to many as if it would have no end. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) Jay Gatsby’s houseguest Klipspringer expresses the sentiment of the time as he plays the song “Ain’t We Got Fun?” on the piano and sings the line about nothing being surer than the expectation that “the rich get richer.”1 The August 1929 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal featured an article titled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich.” A...
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