Despite receiving a number of rejection slips, Salinger continued to write and submit stories. He sold his first Holden Caulfield story (eventually revised and titled “Slight Rebellion Off Madison”) to the prestigious New Yorker magazine in 1941, but it was not published until 1946.
During the war, Salinger served as an enlisted man, reaching the rank of sergeant, and continued writing. He received counterintelligence training and landed on Utah Beach, Normandy, on D-day (June 6, 1944). Sergeant Salinger participated in five campaigns in Europe, witnessing some of the heaviest fighting in the war. He carried a portable typewriter in his jeep, serving his apprenticeship through commercially successful (if mostly forgettable) stories published in popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire. “I’m Crazy,” appearing in Collier’s magazine in 1945, included material later used in The Catcher in the Rye. But for the most part, Salinger tried to dissuade any republishing of these works. As he said in a rare interview with the New York Times in 1974, he preferred that such inferior efforts “die a perfectly natural death.” A two-volume pirated edition of uncollected pieces did appear in 1974 despite the best efforts of Salinger and his attorney.
In 1946, a ninety-page novella (a short novel) about Holden Caulfield was nearly published, but Salinger withdrew from the agreement. Another five years passed before he introduced the classic in novel form.
In September of 1945, while still in Europe immediately following the war, Salinger apparently married a French professional, perhaps a physician, named Sylvia (whose maiden name is unknown). A divorce was granted in 1947. He married Claire Douglas on February 17, 1955. The couple had a daughter, Margaret Ann, and a son, Matthew, but divorced in 1967.
