Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour - an Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour - an Introduction

Summary

A haunting portrait of family tragedy from the acclaimed author of The Catcher in the Rye

'He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and virtually all things to his brothers and sisters in our somewhat outsized family. Surely he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet...'

These two novellas, set seventeen years apart, are both concerned with Seymour Glass - the eldest son of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family - as recalled by his closest brother, Buddy.

'The Glasses are one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully-realized families in all fiction' The New York Times

About the author

J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger was born in 1919 and died in January 2010. He grew up in New York City and wrote short stories from an early age, but his breakthrough came in 1948 with the publication in the New Yorker of 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'. The Catcher in the Rye was his first and only novel, published in 1951. It remains one of the most translated, taught and reprinted texts, and has sold over 65 million copies worldwide. He went on to write three further, critically acclaimed, best-selling works of fiction: Franny and Zooey, For Esmé - With Love And Squalor and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour - An Introduction. Salinger continued to write throughout his life and left behind a large body of unpublished work.
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