Like Franny, Mr. Salinger’s people feel that “everything everybody does is so  I don’t know  not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and  sad-making.”

Mr. Salinger was able to empathetically limn the nooks and crannies of his youthful narrator’s psyches, while conjuring up a sophisticated, post-F. Scott Fitzgerald, post-World War II Manhattan  a world familiar to his New Yorker readers, bounded by Radio City Music Hall and Bergdorf Goodman and Central Park (where Holden wonders about the ducks on the lagoon and where they go when it freezes over in the winter). In doing so, he not only domesticated the innovations of the great modernists  their ability to manipulate stream of consciousness, to probe their characters’ inner lives  but he also presaged the self-inventorying characters of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and the navel-gazing musings of the writers of many Me Generations to come.

Some critics dismissed the easy surface charm of Mr. Salinger’s work, accusing him of cuteness and sentimentality, but works like “Catcher,” “Franny and Zooey” and his best-known short stories would influence successive generations of writers. His most persuasive work showcased his colloquial, idiomatic language, his uncanny gift for ventriloquism, his nimble ability to create stories within stories, as well as his unerring ear for cosmopolitan New Yorkese (what he called an “Ear for the Rhythms and Cadences of Colloquial Speech”) and his heat-seeking eye for the telling gesture  the nervously lit cigarette, the X-ray look, the inhibited station-platform kiss.

Like Holden Caulfield, the Glass children  Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Seymour, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker  would emerge as avatars of adolescent angst and Mr. Salinger’s own alienated stance toward the world. Bright, charming and gregarious, they are blessed with their creator’s ability to entertain, and they appeal to the reader to identify with their braininess, their sensitivity, their febrile specialness. And yet as details of their lives unfurl in a series of stories, it becomes clear that there is a darker side to their estrangement as well: a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses, an almost incestuous familial self-involvement and a difficulty relating to other people that will result in emotional crises and in Seymour’s case, suicide. “Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don’t like,” Zooey’s mother says, adding, “You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.”

Over time, Mr. Salinger’s work grew more elliptical. Tidy, well-made tales like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” gave way to the increasingly prolix “Zooey” and the shapeless ruminations of “Seymour  An Introduction.” And as his Glass stories grew more and more self-conscious and self-referential, readers became increasingly aware of the solipsism of that hothouse family of geniuses.