50 Fun Facts About J. D. Salinger

Salinger's girlfriend Oona O'Neill, a playwright's daughter, left him in the 1940s for which film star?

Charlie Chaplin married Oona in June 1943, a month after she turned 18. Salinger had phoned her often and written her long letters before the romance ended.

Which Kevin Costner film replaced the novel's kidnapped J. D. Salinger with a fictional writer, fearing a lawsuit?

Field of Dreams turned Salinger into the reclusive Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones. In W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, the hero takes the real author to a ball game.

Whose killer stayed at the New York scene reading a copy of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye?

John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, had bought the book that same day. He sat reading it outside the Dakota building until police arrived and arrested him.

Salinger, serving with the US 4th Infantry Division, was at which Normandy beach on D-Day?

Utah Beach was only the start of Salinger's war. He went on to the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in five campaigns and rising to staff sergeant.

Salinger's son Matt became an actor and played which Marvel superhero in a 1990 film?

Captain America is one of Matt Salinger's two best-known films, with Revenge of the Nerds. After his father died, he became an executor of the literary estate.

Which famous novelist, then a war correspondent in Paris, did Salinger arrange to meet during World War II?

Ernest Hemingway was impressed by the young soldier's writing, and the two began corresponding. Salinger later wrote that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war.

To which New England state did Salinger retreat in 1953, living in the small town of Cornish until his death?

New Hampshire gave Salinger more than half a century of seclusion. Readers and Dartmouth students still travelled to Cornish in groups, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

The title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from Holden Caulfield mishearing a poem by which Scottish writer?

Robert Burns wrote Comin' Thro' the Rye in the 1780s. Holden swaps one verb in a line of it, and his whole daydream about rescuing children grows out of that mistake.

Which French film star tried to buy the screen rights to a Salinger short story, an offer he refused?

Brigitte Bardot was turned down even though Salinger told a friend he was tempted. He had barred all screen versions of his work after a 1949 adaptation that critics lambasted.

Which item of clothing does Holden Caulfield hand to his little sister late in The Catcher in the Rye?

A hunting hat is the catcher's symbol in the novel. When Holden passes it on, one critical reading has the pair swapping roles, with his sister now the one doing the rescuing.

Which word is Holden Caulfield's signature put-down for adults and their world in The Catcher in the Rye?

Phony is Holden's verdict on people who are dishonest or fake about who they really are. The narrator owns up to plenty of duplicity himself, which is part of the joke.

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield keeps wondering where which New York birds go during the winter?

Ducks, and where they go in the cold, are a puzzle Holden cannot let drop. A 2005 novel has its own characters stop beside a Manhattan boat pond to ponder his question.

Which fictional Pennsylvania boarding school expels Holden Caulfield at the start of The Catcher in the Rye?

Pencey Prep throws Holden out after he fails every class except English. He has left other schools before, and he catches a train to New York City that same night.

What is the name of Holden Caulfield's younger sister, whom he treats to a carousel ride in Central Park?

Phoebe scolds Holden for getting expelled and asks whether he cares about anything. The sight of her riding the carousel in the rain is what finally makes him happy.

Which military academy, Salinger's alma mater, is widely seen as the model for Holden Caulfield's boarding school?

Valley Forge is where the teenage Salinger began writing stories under the covers at night by flashlight. He also edited the literary pages of the class yearbook, Crossed Sabres.

Which actor said Salinger inspired the reclusive novelist he played in the 2000 film Finding Forrester?

Sean Connery played William Forrester, who mentors a gifted sixteen-year-old from the Bronx. Film critics had drawn the comparison before the actor confirmed it.

Which animated Netflix comedy imagines Salinger faking his death and then running a television game show?

BoJack Horseman cast Alan Arkin as the voice of Salinger in its second and third seasons. The gag runs against type: the real author spent decades shunning publicity.

Which comedian, Salinger said in the 1970s, had tried for years to land the part of Holden Caulfield?

Jerry Lewis had not even read the novel until he was in his thirties. Director Billy Wilder also chased the screen rights and got nowhere.

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan in 1919 on which holiday?

New Year's Day 1919 brought the family a son they nicknamed Sonny. His father traded in kosher cheese, and his only sibling was an older sister, Doris.

In Salinger's fiction, the parents of the seven Glass children are retired performers in which kind of show?

Vaudeville veterans Les and Bessie Glass raised seven precocious children, who all appeared on the radio quiz show It's a Wise Child.

Holden Caulfield treasures which object that belonged to his late brother Allie, who covered it in poems?

A baseball mitt, left-handed and inscribed with poetry, is Holden's keepsake of Allie, who died of leukemia as a boy. Holden writes his roommate's homework essay about it.

Holden Caulfield accuses his older brother D.B., a gifted writer, of selling out by moving where?

Hollywood is where D.B. writes screenplays, which Holden treats as a betrayal of real talent. He still reveres his brother's writing skill, English being his own best subject.

In Holden Caulfield's daydream of being the catcher in the rye, what does he save children from?

Falling off a cliff is the danger Holden pictures as youngsters run through the tall rye. Critics read the drop as the passage into the adult world he distrusts.

Biographer Paul Alexander likened the publicity-shy Salinger to which famously private film star?

Greta Garbo was the comparison for a man who gave his final interview in 1980. As early as 1961, a Time cover story was already describing his life as that of a recluse.

By the late 1940s Salinger followed which religion so keenly that he gave his dates reading lists on it?

Zen Buddhism was the first of many faiths Salinger explored. He moved on to Vedanta Hinduism, Kriya yoga and Christian Science, and his studies surface in stories such as Teddy.

Which English actor played the young J. D. Salinger in the 2017 biopic Rebel in the Rye?

Nicholas Hoult starred opposite Kevin Spacey, who played the author's writing mentor. The film was adapted from Kenneth Slawenski's biography J. D. Salinger: A Life.

Joyce Maynard left which university after her freshman year in 1972 to live with the 53-year-old Salinger?

Yale lost Maynard after a New York Times essay made her famous at 18 and Salinger wrote to warn her about fame. They exchanged 25 letters before she moved in with him.

At McBurney School the teenage Salinger managed which sports team, whose kit Holden Caulfield loses on the subway?

Fencing was one of several McBurney pursuits for Salinger, who also wrote for the school newspaper and acted in plays. In the novel, McBurney is where Holden's team was headed.

In April 1945 Sergeant Salinger entered Kaufering IV, a subcamp of which Nazi concentration camp?

Dachau's subcamp came near the end of five campaigns for Salinger. After Germany's defeat he checked into a civilian hospital for combat stress, avoiding an army psychiatric discharge.

A 1979 study ranked The Catcher in the Rye the second most-taught novel in US public high schools, behind which book?

Of Mice and Men was the only novel assigned more often. The same study found Salinger's book was also the most frequently censored in the nation, and some teachers lost their jobs over it.

Salinger's French and German put him in which line of US Army work, interrogating prisoners of war?

Counterintelligence took Salinger from Normandy into Germany with a unit also known as the Ritchie Boys. After the surrender he signed on for six more months of denazification duty.

In late 1941, before the army drafted him, Salinger briefly worked as an activity director aboard what?

A Caribbean cruise ship hired Salinger as an activity director and possibly as a performer. He had shown a talent for drama at school, though his father opposed an acting career.

Which 1949 film, adapted from a Salinger story, so dismayed him that he never sold screen rights again?

My Foolish Heart starred Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward and was based on Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. It remains the only authorized film of anything Salinger wrote.

The 1995 film Pari, an unauthorized take on Salinger's Franny and Zooey, was made in which country?

Iran had no copyright relations with the United States, so director Dariush Mehrjui could release the film legally at home. Salinger's lawyers still blocked a 1998 Lincoln Center screening.

In the unauthorized 2009 sequel that Salinger sued to block, a 76-year-old Holden-like figure has escaped from where?

A nursing home is where 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye begins, written by Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting. A judge barred its US release, and the case was settled in 2011.

Salinger sued in 1986 to stop Ian Hamilton's biography because it drew heavily on which private material?

His unpublished letters were ruled off limits because an author's right to control first publication outweighed fair use. Hamilton wrote a book about the hunt for Salinger instead.

Who landed a rare interview with Salinger soon after his 1953 move to Cornish, printed in a local daily?

A high school student, Shirley Blaney, talked him into it for the school page of The Daily Eagle. When the paper ran it prominently, Salinger dropped the teenagers he had been hosting.

Which software entrepreneur bought Salinger's letters to Joyce Maynard at auction in 1999, planning to return them?

Peter Norton paid $156,500 for the letters and announced he would hand them back to their writer. Maynard said financial pressure had forced her to sell them.

In the late 1930s Salinger's father urged him to learn the meat-importing trade in which European capital?

Vienna, along with a stint in Bydgoszcz in Poland, showed Salinger the slaughterhouses that disgusted him. The experience likely shaped his vegetarianism as an adult.

Salinger's last published work, the 1965 novella Hapworth 16, 1924, takes what unusual form?

A letter from summer camp, written by a seven-year-old Glass child, took up most of one magazine issue. Critics panned it, and Salinger published nothing more in his lifetime.

Which 1948 Salinger story, about a young married couple on vacation in Florida, first featured the Glass family?

A Perfect Day for Bananafish took a year of reworking with the magazine's editors before it ran. Its acclaim won Salinger a first-look contract with The New Yorker.

Which eldest Glass sibling, a brilliant but troubled figure, is the focus of several Salinger stories?

Seymour became a university professor at 20 and starred on a radio show as a boy. Most of what readers learn about him is narrated by his younger brother Buddy.

In Salinger's Franny and Zooey, which devotion from The Way of a Pilgrim fascinates the young Franny Glass?

The Jesus Prayer comes from the tale of a Russian wanderer, in a book Franny carries with her. Salinger borrowed the detail from his wife Claire, who owned a copy.

Which Salinger story, about an American sergeant who meets a young girl before combat, gave Nine Stories its UK title?

For Esmé—with Love and Squalor is narrated by a traumatized soldier, and biographers believe it draws on Salinger's own war. It first appeared in The New Yorker in April 1950.

Which Story magazine editor taught Salinger's university writing class and published his first short story in 1940?

Whit Burnett said his student barely stood out until the last weeks of the course, then suddenly finished three stories. The two later fell out over a collection that never appeared.

At which Pennsylvania college did Salinger spend one semester, writing a campus column that included movie reviews?

Ursinus set up a J. D. Salinger Scholarship in 2006 that let a freshman live in his old dormitory room. His representatives asked within a week for his name to be removed.

The title of Salinger's story Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters borrows a line from which ancient poet?

Sappho's line is left on a bathroom mirror by Boo Boo Glass, as a message for her brother on his wedding day. The groom then fails to show up for the ceremony.

Which eminent American judge was the one close friend Salinger saw regularly after withdrawing from Cornish society?

Learned Hand, born in 1872, was almost half a century older than his neighbour. He died in 1961, the year Time magazine put the reclusive novelist on its cover.

Which wartime shock made The New Yorker shelve Salinger's first accepted Holden Caulfield story until 1946?

Pearl Harbor was attacked just as Slight Rebellion off Madison was due to run. Its tale of dissatisfied upper-class youths was judged wrong for the wartime mood.

Which publishing house brought out Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in July 1951 and Franny and Zooey a decade later?

Little, Brown saw the novel reprinted eight times within two months of publication. It went on to spend 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.