Nine Stories, published in 1953, is a collection of Salinger’s short stories, and is considered one of the finest short-story collections in the English language. Taking his cues from such masters of the medium as Guy de Maupassant and James Joyce, Salinger presents a series of brief narratives or vignettes – rarely over twenty pages in length in the average edition – in which small-scale reversals occur. The narratives hinge on these reversals: consider the revelation of the lie in “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” the epiphany in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” the day Mary Hudson refrains from playing baseball in “The Laughing Man.”
Salinger had already hit the literary stage by...
