Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

The last book-length work of fiction by J. D. Salinger published in his lifetime collects two novellas about "one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully realized families in all fiction" (New York Times).

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.

"He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and virtually all things to his brot...