Franny and Zooey is a book by American author J.D. Salinger which comprises his short story, "Franny", and novella, Zooey. The two works were published together as a book in 1961

1961 in literature

The year 1961 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*First English production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui*Michael Halliday publishes his seminal paper on the systemic functional grammar model....

; the two stories originally appeared in The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

in 1955 and 1957, respectively. Franny and Zooey, a sister and brother both in their twenties, are the two youngest members of the Glass family

Glass family

The Glass family is a group of fictional characters that have been featured in a number of J. D. Salinger's short stories. All but one of the Glass family stories were first published in The New Yorker; several of them have been collected and published in the compilations Nine Stories, Raise High...

, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings.
The short story, "Franny", takes place in an unnamed college town during the weekend of "the Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

 game" and tells the tale of an undergraduate who is becoming disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her.

The novella, Zooey, is named for Zooey Glass, the second-youngest member of the Glass family, a somewhat emotionally toughened genius who at the age of twelve had "a vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy was the founder of Christian Science , a Protestant American system of religious thought and practice religion adopted by the Church of Christ, Scientist, and others...

's." As his younger sister, Franny, suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown in her parents' Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

 living room – leaving Bessie, her mother, deeply concerned – Zooey comes to her aid, offering what he thinks is brotherly love, understanding, and words of sage advice.
This section concerns Franny's weekend date with her collegiate boyfriend, Lane Coutell.