The Young Folks (short story)

“The Young Folks” is a work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger published in the March–April 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.

Plot
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.

Style and Theme
Literary critic John Wenke characterizes “The Young Folk” as a critique of “social manners” in which Salinger “depicts a sterile world populated by petty people” - 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: "The story satirizes characters very much like himself and the people that he knew: upper-class college students obsessed with the petty details of their own shallow lives. It was characteristic of its time and heavily influenced by the writing style of F. Scott Fitzgerald."

Slawenski adds that “rather than depicting affluent young lives an enviable, ‘The Young Folks’ shone a stark spotlight on the unglamorous truths of upper-class society, exposing the emptiness and unromantic realities of their existence...”