Sergeant Salinger

About this book

A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combat J.D. Salinger mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyns 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 warfrom 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.