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I always thought Salinger was influenced by the Beats too, although he is classified with the postwar Jewish writers: all those Zen stories in his later work and he surely had a grasp of the core of it and how it was congruent with Christianity.

Thanks for the reply. I suspect Salinger came to his interest in Eastern religions on his own, since he was an older, more established writer when Kerouac and Ginsberg were still struggling and the works he read weren't always the same as the ones Kerouac or Ginsberg studied, but Salinger and the Beats were definitely moving in the same current in the 1950s.

I'm of two minds about the Beats. They really spoke to something in people at a certain point in life, and they still do. But it's not necessarily something you can build a society on. In a way their interest in Eastern religion was fitting, since those religions also talk about different stages of life requiring different actions and responses.

I thought of adding a statement to my post that I certainly don’t agree with the immorality involved in both the hippie and Beat movements. I’m glad you mentioned the Jesus Freaks. That was a good outgrowth from the tree. The blanket antiwar sentiment and the free love idea not so much.