'They are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper, too, but I expect to be fussing with it, to use a popular trade term, for some time to come.' (From the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey.) I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. 'Both are early, critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. Fans like to speculate that Salinger continued the Glass family saga in private, a hope bolstered by Salinger's comments on the dust jackets of the 1961 Franny and Zooey and the 1963 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: an Introduction: After the publication of the final Glass story, the author became a recluse in his home in New Hampshire. The final Glass family story, 'Hapworth 16, 1924,' appeared in The New Yorker in 1965 and is the last work Salinger ever published. These two short stories were combined and published as the novel Franny and Zooey in 1961. Franny comes home seeking help for her troubles and is guided through them by her brother Zooey, who is somewhat troubled by the same concerns as his sister. 'Zooey,' three times as long and published also in The New Yorker two years later, is a continuation of the story. 'Franny,' a short story published in The New Yorker in January of 1955, is the story of the youngest member of the Glass family, Franny, a college student in the midst of a spiritual and personal crisis. Salinger explores the Glass family through several other short stories, including ' A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,' and 'Seymour: an Introduction.' These stories, like Franny and Zooey, reflect Salinger's interest in Eastern philosophies a strong spiritual theme runs through all of these works.

Now, as adults in Salinger's stories, the Glass children struggle to adapt themselves to normal social lives. The seven fictional Glass siblings were precocious children (some of them even geniuses) who enjoyed child celebrity. Salinger is an American author famous first for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye and second for his Glass family stories, a series of short stories about seven unique brothers and sisters.