He considered Hemingway and Steinbeck second rate writers but praised Melville. In 1945 Salinger married a French woman named Sylvia - she was a doctor. They were divorced and in 1955 Salinger married Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic Robert Langton Douglas. The marriage ended in divorce in 1967, when Salinger's retreat into his private world and Zen Buddhism only increased. Salinger's early short stories appeared in such magazines as Story, where his first story was published in 1940, Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, and then in the New Yorker, which published almost all of his later texts. In 1948 appeared 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish', which introduced Seymour Glass, who commits suicide. It was the earliest reference to the Glass family, whose stories would go on to form the main corpus of his writing. The 'Glass cycle' continued in the collections FRANNY AND ZOOEY (1961), RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS (1963) and SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION (1963). Several of the stories are narrated by Buddy Glass. 'Hapworth 16, 1924' is written in the form of a letter from summer camp, in which the seven-year-old Seymour draws a portrait of him and his younger brother Buddy. "When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly more original poets we've had in America, as well as the numerous talented eccentric poets and - in modern times, especially - the many gifted style deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have only three or four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few." (from Seymour, An Introduction)
Twenty stories published in Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and New Yorker between 1941 and 1948 appeared in a pirated edition in 1974, THE COMPLETE UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF J.D. SALINGER (2 vols.). Many of them reflect Salinger's own service in the army. Later Salinger adopted Hindu-Buddhist influences. He became an ardent devotee of The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna, a study of Hindu mysticism, which was translated into English by Swami Nikhilananda and Joseph Campbell.
Salinger's first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, became immediately a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and gained a huge international success. It sells still some 250 000 copies annually. Salinger did not do much to help publicity, and asked that his photograph is not used in connection with the book. "Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything.