A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combat
"Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons." --New
Yorker
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.
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and
nonfiction, including Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin. He lives in
New York.
