"Two Lonely Men" is an unpublished

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the old ...

J. D. Salinger Jerome David Salinger ( ; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author best known for his 1951 novel '' The Catcher in the Rye''. Salinger published several short stories in '' Story'' magazine in 1940, before serving in World Wa ...

Plot

The story is told from the point of view of a

narrator Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the ...

who is a professional short story writer now working as a

Morse Code Morse code is a telecommunications method which Character encoding, encodes Written language, text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code i ...

Instructor. The setting is an

Army An army, ground force or land force is an armed force that fights primarily on land. In the broadest sense, it is the land-based military branch, service branch or armed service of a nation or country. It may also include aviation assets by ...

base in Georgia, where the narrator details the developing friendship of two officers. One, a Captain, has a wife who visits and subsequently describes an affair she had while he was stationed. At the close of the story, the

Captain Captain is a title, an appellative for the commanding officer of a military unit; the supreme leader or highest rank officer of a navy ship, merchant ship, aeroplane, spacecraft, or other vessel; or the commander of a port, fire or police depa ...

approaches the narrator and tells him he has requested a transfer, because he now does not like the other officer.

History

The story was written in 1944, while Salinger was stationed at Bainbridge Air Base, Georgia. A 27-page, dated

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...

is available at Princeton University's

Firestone Library Princeton University Library is the main library system of Princeton University. With holdings of more than 7 million books, 6 million microforms, and 48,000 linear feet of manuscripts, it is among the largest libraries in the world by number of ...

, part of the library's ''Story'' magazine archives.Salinger, Jerome David. Manuscript for "Two Lonely Men." Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: Princeton Firestone Library. Archives of Story Magazine and Story Press, 1931-1999: Finding Aid. Box 14, Folder 25

/ref> Copies of the story are not permitted.

Footnotes

Sources

*Slawenski, Kenneth. 2010. ''J. D. Salinger: A Life''.

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

, New York. {{J. D. Salinger Short stories by J. D. Salinger