| The Young Folks | |
| Author: | J. D. Salinger |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Published In: | Story |
| Pub Date: | March–April 1940 |
“The Young Folks” is a work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger published in the March–April 1940 issue of Story magazine. The story is included in the 2014 Salinger collection Three Early Stories.[1] [2]
“The Young Folks” is Salinger's first published story.[3] [4]
The story takes place at a New York cocktail party and details the emptiness of the conversation between a young woman and a male college student.[5] [6]
Literary critic John Wenke characterizes “The Young Folk” as a critique of “social manners” in which Salinger “depicts a sterile world populated by petty people” - a world of social elites of which he was a member.[7] Biographer Kenneth Slawenski notes the influence of one of Salinger's contemporaries who died the year that the story was published:
Slawenski adds that “rather than depicting affluent young lives an enviable, ‘The Young Folks’ shone a stark spotlight on the unglamorous truths of upper-class society, exposing the emptiness and unromantic realities of their existence...”[8]