Overview

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war-from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a 'spook,' with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

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9780857304711

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Reviews

Charyn's book stands on its own merits as a masterly portrait of a young man's terrible war * Times * Supremely engaging... A smoothly told, unexpectedly affecting foray into a lesser-known chapter of the literary giant's life * Kirkus (starred review) * In this literary tour de force... Charyn vividly portrays Sonny's journey from slick short story writer to suffering artist. The winning result humanizes a legend * Publishers Weekly * Nuanced and acutely perceptive... Charyn offers an astute psychological portrait of an elusive yet vastly compelling subject * Booklist * Charyn peers into the traumas that formed the lifelong recluse and his enigmatic stories... An engaging and informative rendering of an important American author * Historical Novel Society *

'[A] literary tour de force... Charyn vividly portrays [J.D. Salinger's] journey from slick short story writer to suffering artist. The winning result humanizes a legend' Publishers Weekly (starred review); 'This supremely engaging novel leaves us with a new, sometimes heart-rending understanding of [J.D. Salinger] and the times in which he came of age' Kirkus Reviews (starred review); 'Charyn deftly leaves the reader wondering whether Holden Caulfield's teenage angst was really Salinger's personification of post-traumatic stress disorder... Engrossing' Library Journal; 'Nuanced and acutely perceptive... Charyn offers an astute psychological portrait of an elusive yet vastly compelling subject' Booklist

Author Information

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.

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