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

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."