 In a July 1951 profile in Book of the Month Club News , Salinger 's friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell asked Salinger about his literary influences . Salinger responded : " A writer , when he 's asked to discuss his craft , ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves . I love Kafka , Flaubert , Tolstoy , Chekhov , Dostoevsky , Proust , O 'Casey , Rilke , Lorca , Keats , Rimbaud , Burns , E. Brontë , Jane Austen , Henry James , Blake , Coleridge . I won 't name any living writers . I don 't think it 's right . " In letters written in the 1940s , Salinger had expressed his admiration of three living , or recently deceased , writers : Sherwood Anderson , Ring Lardner , and F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as " Fitzgerald 's successor " . Salinger 's " A Perfect Day for Bananafish " has an ending similar to that of Fitzgerald 's earlier published short story " May Day " . 
