"The Young Folks" is a work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger published in the MarchâÂÂApril 1940 issue of Story magazine. The story is included in the 2014 Salinger collection Three Early Stories.
"The Young Folks" is Salinger's first published story.
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.
Salinger wrote, "About eleven o'clock, Lucille Henderson, observing that her party was soaring at the proper height, and just having been smiled at by Jack Delroy, forced herself to glance over in the direction of Edna Phillips, who since eight o'clock had been sitting in the big red chair, smoking cigarettes and yodelling hellos and wearing a very bright eye which young men were not bothering to catch."
Literary critic John Wenke characterizes "The Young Folks" as a critique of âÂÂsocial mannersâ in which Salinger âÂÂdepicts a sterile world populated by petty peopleâ - a world of social elites of which he was a member. Biographer Kenneth Slawenski notes the influence of one of Salinger's contemporaries who died the year that the story was published:
Slawenski adds that âÂÂrather than depicting affluent young lives an enviable, âÂÂThe Young Folksâ shone a stark spotlight on the unglamorous truths of upper-class society, exposing the emptiness and unromantic realities of their existence...âÂÂ
After learning of the existence of 21 stories written before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye in a 2013 documentary about Salinger, publishers researched rights to Salinger stories and learned J.D. Salinger never registered the rights of "The Young Folks" short story. In 2014, "The Young Folks" was published, along with two other Salinger short stories, into the book, Three Early Stories.