Glass family, fictional family composed of precocious and unhappy adolescents and troubled adults whose lives and philosophies dominated the short stories of J.D. Salinger. The short fiction about the Glass family was originally published in The New Yorker magazine from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and was collected in Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (published together in 1963). The most prominent members of the family are Bessie Glass and her children Seymour, Buddy, Zooey (born Zachary), and Franny.

When you eat dirt for the first time and leave your family to build a shack in the woods