The Kit Book For Soldiers, Sailors and Marines: Favorite Stories, Verse, and Cartoons for the Entertainment of Servicemen Everywhere. [The Hang of It].

BARROWS, R. M. [J.D. Salinger; Richard Armour; Hurd Barrett; Pat Frank; O. Henry; Rudyard Kipling; Jack Leonard; Damon Runyan; et al].

Item Number: 123104

Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, Inc., 1943.

First edition, second issue of this classic World War II-era short story collection, containing J.D. Salinger’s third published short story and first appearance in book form. 12mo, original illustrated boards, illustrated. Complied by R.M. Barrows, edited by E. X. Pastor and with contributions from J.D. Salinger, Richard Armour, Hurd Barrett, Pat Frank, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, Jack Leonard, and Damon Runyan among others. Signed by J.D. Salinger on the first page of his contribution, The Hang of It, on page 332. A commercial tale of a soldier who just can’t seem to get “the hang of it”, the story was first published in the July 12, 1941 issue of Collier’s magazine and subsequently in the 1942 and 1943 editions of The Kit Book For Soldiers, marking Salinger’s first appearance in book form. Salinger was drafted into the army in the spring of 1942, several months after the United States entered World War II, where he saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, who was then working as a war correspondent in Paris. The meeting had a profound effect on Salinger and the development of his writing style; Hemingway was impressed by what Salinger shared with him of his early writing and the two corresponded frequently throughout the war. Salinger was later assigned to the 4th Counter Intelligence Corps in which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war and later witnessed the liberation of one of the Dachau Concentration Camps. In very good condition. Housed in the original box which is in near fine condition. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. From the collection of a WWII soldier who had this signed by Salinger while the two were stationed overseas at the time of publication. An exceptional example, signed by Salinger at a pivotal time in his life and before his almost complete withdrawal from society.

Best-known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, American author J.D. Salinger published several short stories and five books throughout his lifetime. In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote: "I almost always write about very young people," a statement that has been referred to as his credo. Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger's work, from his first published short story, "The Young Folks" (1940), to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass family stories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young readers, but another was "a consciousness [among youths] that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world." For this reason, Norman Mailer once remarked that Salinger was "the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school."