109 Fun Facts About The Catcher in the Rye

What did J. D. Salinger become after The Catcher in the Rye?

A recluse: Salinger moved to the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1953, published his last story in 1965 and guarded his privacy there until his death in 2010.

Which publisher first brought out The Catcher in the Rye?

Little, Brown and Company: once the first deal collapsed, Salinger's agent, Dorothy Olding, sent the manuscript to the Boston house, which took it at once.

What is the name of the boarding school Holden has just been expelled from?

Pencey Prep: on his last Saturday there, the whole school is down at the big football game against Saxon Hall while Holden watches alone from a hilltop.

Holden, manager of his school's fencing team, ruins a New York match by doing what?

Leaving the foils on the subway: Holden kept jumping up to check the map for their stop, so the match never happened and the team refused to speak to him all the way back.

Holden's prep school is widely seen as modelled on which school J. D. Salinger attended?

Valley Forge Military Academy: unlike Holden, Salinger lasted. His parents sent him there in 1934, and he graduated in 1936 as literary editor of the class yearbook.

Which is the only subject Holden passes at the school that expels him?

English: Holden says he hardly had to work at it, having already covered Beowulf at an earlier school. He fails everything else, history included.

Why does Holden say he left Elkton Hills, one of his earlier schools?

All the phonies: Holden says he was surrounded by them, above all the headmaster, who charmed most parents and gave the funny-looking ones only a quick handshake. The school now expelling him is about his fourth.

What is the name of Holden's roommate, who goes on a date with Holden's childhood friend?

Ward Stradlater: Holden calls him a 'secret slob', always immaculate to look at but shaving with a razor that is rusty and clogged with old lather and hair.

Which girl, whom Holden remembers keeping her kings in the back row at checkers, does his roommate date?

Jane Gallagher is waiting only minutes away, yet Holden just keeps saying he ought to go down and say hello, and never does.

Holden writes his roommate's composition about what object?

His dead brother's baseball glove: Allie had covered it with poems in green ink to read out in the field. The roommate complains it isn't about a room or a house, so Holden tears the essay up.

What illness killed Holden's younger brother Allie?

Leukemia: Allie died when Holden was thirteen. Years later a frightened Holden still begs him aloud, at the end of every block, not to let him disappear.

What does Holden say he did the night his brother Allie died?

Smashed windows: he slept in the garage that night and broke every pane with his bare fist. He says the hand still hurts when it rains, and he can no longer make a proper fist.

What is the name of Holden's younger sister, whom he sneaks home to see?

Phoebe: she writes unfinished stories about a girl detective whose name she spells 'Hazle' Weatherfield, and she has landed the part of Benedict Arnold in her school's play.

What does Holden's sister hand him before he leaves?

Christmas money: his ten-year-old sister hands over all eight dollars and sixty-five cents she has left for presents. Holden doesn't want to take it, and when she insists he suddenly starts to cry.

Which Dickens novel does Holden brush aside in the first sentence of The Catcher in the Rye?

David Copperfield: Holden refuses to begin with where he was born and 'all that David Copperfield kind of crap'. Dickens's novel opens with a chapter called 'I Am Born'.

The Catcher in the Rye's title comes from Holden misremembering a poem by which poet?

Robert Burns: his song is about Jenny, who gets her petticoat soaked coming through the rye. The cliff and the falling children are Holden's own addition.

Holden quotes a song as 'if a body catch a body comin' through the rye'; which word did 'catch' replace?

Meet: his little sister corrects him on the spot. Holden admits she is right, then goes on describing his daydream of catching children all the same.

Where does Holden hear the song behind his 'catcher in the rye' fantasy?

From a boy in the street: a small child is walking beside the kerb, singing to himself while cars brake around him and his parents pay no attention. The sight lifts Holden's gloom.

At which hotel does Holden take a room when he reaches New York?

The Edmont: from his window Holden watches the other guests, among them a couple squirting their drinks into each other's faces, and decides the hotel is 'lousy with perverts'.

What is the name of the nightclub inside Holden's hotel where he dances with three women?

The Lavender Room: the three are tourists from Seattle, so Holden teases one by claiming Gary Cooper has just walked out. They leave him to pay the whole thirteen-dollar bill.

What is the name of the young prostitute Holden hires and then only wants to talk to?

Sunny: Holden loses his nerve, claims he is recovering from an operation on his 'clavichord' and pays her the agreed five dollars just to talk. She insists the price is ten.

Which question does Holden keep asking New York cab drivers in The Catcher in the Rye?

Where the ducks go in winter: he means the ducks on the Central Park lagoon once it freezes. One cabbie thinks Holden is kidding him, and another snaps that the fish have it tougher.

What is the name of the elevator operator and pimp who beats and robs Holden?

Maurice: he comes back demanding five dollars more than the price he quoted and punches Holden for arguing. Holden then staggers about pretending he has a bullet in his gut.

Which girl does Holden take on a date and then invite to run away with him?

Sally Hayes: after they go ice skating, Holden asks her to run off with him to a cabin in New England. When she says no, he insults her and the date ends with her in tears.

Which older former schoolmate joins Holden for drinks, only to be pestered with questions about sex?

Carl Luce: three years older and now at Columbia, he refuses to have 'a typical Caulfield conversation'. He tells Holden to see a psychoanalyst, pays his bill and leaves.

Which teacher does Holden visit to say goodbye at the start of The Catcher in the Rye?

Mr. Spencer: the elderly history teacher, laid up with the grippe, makes the visit excruciating by reading Holden's feeble exam essay on the Egyptians back to him aloud.

Which former teacher offers Holden a couch for the night, then unsettles him by stroking his head?

Mr. Antolini was the one teacher who went to James Castle, the boy who jumped to his death, and carried him to the infirmary under his own coat. The book never settles what the head-stroking meant.

After fleeing his teacher's apartment, where does Holden spend the rest of the night?

Grand Central Terminal: his suitcases are already stored there, so he beds down on a waiting-room bench until the morning crowds arrive, more depressed, he says, than he has ever been.

Where does Holden ask his sister to come and say goodbye before he runs away?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: while he waits, Holden leads two small boys to the mummies. His sister then turns up dragging a suitcase, determined to run away with him.

What is Holden watching his sister ride when the rain starts and he suddenly feels happy?

A carousel: as she reaches for the gold ring, Holden decides you have to let children grab for it even if they fall off. He stays on his bench in the downpour, soaked and happy.

From where is Holden narrating The Catcher in the Rye?

A sanatorium in California is what the book implies. Holden says only that he got 'run-down' and had to come out to 'this crumby place', where a psychoanalyst keeps asking about his plans.

What does Holden's older brother D.B. do for a living, to Holden's disgust?

Writes screenplays in Hollywood: Holden calls it being a prostitute, because D.B. used to write stories he loved, above all one about a boy who wouldn't let anyone look at his goldfish.

Holden ends The Catcher in the Rye by warning readers never to do what?

Tell anybody anything: 'If you do, you start missing everybody,' he says, admitting that he now misses even the people who beat him up.

Holden gives ten dollars to which strangers at a New York breakfast counter?

Two nuns: they are schoolteachers just arrived from Chicago, breakfasting on toast and coffee, and one of them happily talks Romeo and Juliet with him.

Salinger sold 'Slight Rebellion off Madison', his first story about Holden, to which magazine in 1941?

The New Yorker accepted the story in 1941, then had second thoughts and held it back for five years. When it finally ran, in December 1946, its author had been to war and back.

Which publisher turned down The Catcher in the Rye after an executive asked if Holden was supposed to be crazy?

Harcourt, Brace: its young editor Robert Giroux wanted the book, but his superior handed it to the textbook department, whose verdict was 'Not for us'.

Which organisation made The Catcher in the Rye its midsummer selection as the novel went on sale?

Book-of-the-Month Club: the pick put Salinger's first novel before the club's members on the day it appeared, and within two months it had been reprinted eight times.

Which sign of age does sixteen-year-old Holden say he already has?

Gray hair: Holden says the right side of his head has been full of it since he was a child, which he finds ironic given how often he acts about twelve.

In 1981 The Catcher in the Rye was America's most censored book and also its second most what?

Taught: only one novel was assigned more often in public high schools. When a desert town's schools dropped it in 1989, the local library soon had fifteen people waiting for a copy that had sat unnoticed for years.

Backers of a 1978 ban on The Catcher in the Rye in Issaquah, Washington, called it part of what?

An overall communist plot: the ban did not last. The three school board members who had voted for it were promptly recalled by the town's voters.

What most often starts the complaints that get The Catcher in the Rye pulled from classrooms?

Holden's swearing: in one desert town the first objection came from a parent who had found three 'goddamns' on a single page. She rang the school to ask, 'How the hell did this teacher get this book?'

Whose killer stayed at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye until police arrived?

John Lennon: Mark David Chapman had bought the paperback that day and written 'This is my statement' inside it, signing the words with Holden Caulfield's name.

What does Holden try to rub off a wall at his little sister's school?

An obscenity: he wipes it off so the children won't see it, then finds another carved in with a knife and decides you couldn't rub out even half of them in a million years.

The Catcher in the Rye has been linked to the gunman who tried to kill which US president?

Ronald Reagan: John Hinckley Jr., who shot him in 1981, was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster and hoped the attack would impress her. A jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

The 1949 film My Foolish Heart adapted which Salinger story?

Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut: Salinger so disliked what the studio made of his story that he never sold film rights again, which is why Holden has never reached the screen.

Which comedian, according to Salinger, 'tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden'?

Jerry Lewis: he tried to buy the screen rights so that he could play the lead himself, but Salinger, soured by what Hollywood had made of an earlier story, would not sell to anyone.

In his plan to run away out West, Holden pictures himself posing as what?

A deaf-mute: he imagines pumping gas where nobody knows him, so that anyone with something to say would have to write it on paper and would soon give up.

Which famous novelist did Sergeant J. D. Salinger seek out in newly liberated Paris?

Ernest Hemingway: he greeted the young sergeant like an old friend and admired one of his stories. Salinger still went on to have Holden sneer at A Farewell to Arms.

How did Salinger respond in 2009 to an unauthorised sequel showing Holden as an old man?

Sued to block it: his lawyers called the novel, by the Swedish writer Fredrik Colting, 'a rip-off pure and simple', and a federal judge barred its publication in the US.

Which band recorded a song called 'Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?' on its second album?

Green Day: Billie Joe Armstrong has said his teachers tried to make him read the book and he wouldn't. He only got through it years later, and then wrote the song.

Who got Salinger to admit in a 1953 interview that The Catcher in the Rye was 'sort of' autobiographical?

A high school student: Salinger thought the piece was for the school page of the local paper. When it ran as a feature on the editorial page he felt betrayed and dropped his teenage friends.

Holden says a really good book leaves you wishing you could do what?

Telephone its author: Holden says he wouldn't mind calling up Isak Dinesen or Thomas Hardy, but he draws the line at Somerset Maugham.

In Holden's slang, what does it mean to be 'snowing' someone?

Winning them over with flattery: Holden uses the word for his roommate's way with a reluctant date, murmured in what he calls an 'Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice'.

Letters released in 2026 show Salinger asked his editor to cut what from The Catcher in the Rye's jacket?

His Jewish and Irish background: he feared 'second-rate reviewers' would seize on it. He was soon 'good and sick' of seeing his own photograph on the jacket as well, and had that removed too.

What does Holden yell down the dormitory corridor as he walks out of his school for good?

Sleep tight, ya morons! He shouts it at the top of his voice, half in tears, then nearly breaks his neck on the peanut shells someone has scattered down the stairs.

Which magazine put The Catcher in the Rye on its list of the 100 best novels published since 1923?

Time: its critics' 2005 list starts at 1923 because that is the year the magazine was founded, a rule that shut out Joyce's Ulysses, published a year too early.

What does Holden hand his little sister just before he slips out of the family apartment?

His red hunting hat: he paid a dollar for it and wears it with the peak turned to the back. She turns up in it for their goodbye the next day, then jams it back on his head.

When Holden says that something 'kills' him, what does he mean?

It really amuses him: 'That kills me,' he says of his little sister's detective stories, whose orphan heroine has a father who keeps turning up.

Adam Gopnik named Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye and which novel as America's three 'perfect books'?

The Great Gatsby: writing after Salinger's death in 2010, Gopnik added that only Holden's book 'defines an entire region of human experience', as the handbook of the adolescent heart.

In Holden Caulfield's 'catcher' fantasy, children play in a rye field at the edge of what?

A cliff is the danger: Holden pictures himself as the only big person around, grabbing any child who runs too close to the edge. The daydream grows out of a song lyric he has misheard.

Disney once developed 'Dufus', an animated take on The Catcher in the Rye starring which animals?

German shepherds were the cast planned for Disney chief Michael Eisner, who loved the novel. Told that Salinger would never sell the film rights, he asked for 'that kind of story' anyway.

Which illness does Holden Caulfield invent when chatting to a classmate's mother on a train?

A brain tumor is the lie: Holden says he is leaving school early for an operation, then adds that he will spend the summer in South America with his grandmother.

Which baseball film comes from a novel whose main character kidnaps J. D. Salinger?

Field of Dreams swapped Salinger for an invented writer, Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones, to head off a lawsuit from the real author. W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe had used his name.

Oona O'Neill, to whom the young J. D. Salinger wrote long letters, married which film star?

Charlie Chaplin married Oona, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, a month after she turned 18. Salinger took it badly and mocked the couple in a bitter letter.

Allie Caulfield wrote what in green ink all over his fielder's mitt, to read out in the field?

Poems covered the fingers and pocket of the left-handed mitt, so Allie had something to read when nobody was up at bat. Holden has shown it to only one person outside the family.

Which Revolutionary War figure does Holden Caulfield's little sister play in her school pageant?

Benedict Arnold, the general who switched sides, is the part she proudly announces when Holden slips into the family apartment at night and wakes her.

Which Billy Joel hit lists The Catcher in the Rye among the headlines of his lifetime?

We Didn't Start the Fire races through headlines from 1949, the year Joel was born, to 1989. The novel arrives in the 1951 verse, right after The King and I.

Holden Caulfield's failed history essay, read aloud by his teacher, was about which ancient people?

The Egyptians got only a few lines from Holden, who added a note telling the old man it was fine to fail him. The teacher reads the note out too.

What happened to a Tulsa teacher in 1960 after she assigned The Catcher in the Rye to her class?

She was fired, then reinstated on appeal, though the school still dropped the book. Two decades as America's most censored classroom novel followed.

Critics class Holden Caulfield, who admits he sometimes acts about thirteen, as which kind of narrator?

Unreliable is the label: critic William Riggan files Holden beside Huck Finn as the 'naif' type, too inexperienced to judge the world he reports. Holden also calls himself a terrific liar.

Which German term for a novel of growing up is routinely applied to The Catcher in the Rye?

Bildungsroman joins the German words for 'formation' and 'novel', and the hero usually ends up wiser. Critics still argue over whether Holden matures at all by the last page.

Which classmate with terrible skin keeps barging into Holden Caulfield's dorm room from next door?

Robert Ackley barges in uninvited, however hard Holden tries to ignore him. Holden still persuades a friend to let him tag along into town, sure he would otherwise sit alone all night picking his pimples.

Ossenburger, whose name is on Holden Caulfield's dorm wing, made his fortune in which business?

Funeral parlors made Ossenburger rich: cheap ones, by Holden's account. When the old boy tells the school he prays to Jesus all the time, Holden pictures him asking for a few more stiffs.

Which memoir, issued to him by mistake, is Holden Caulfield reading in his dorm room?

Out of Africa reaches Holden only because the library hands him the wrong book. Its author, the Danish baroness Karen Blixen, wrote it about the coffee farm she ran in Kenya.

After his brother D.B., which sportswriter and humorist is Holden Caulfield's favourite author?

Ring Lardner, the Chicago sportswriter turned short-story satirist, ranks second only to D.B. on Holden's list. Holden's test of a book is whether it makes him laugh once in a while.

What does Holden Caulfield's roommate borrow from him to wear on a Saturday-night date?

A hound's-tooth jacket goes out on the date, with Holden begging his broad-shouldered roommate not to stretch it. Holden stays behind to write the same roommate's homework.

What is Holden Caulfield carrying when a bus driver tells him to get rid of it before the ride?

A snowball: Holden packs it at his window, cannot bring himself to throw it at a car or a hydrant because they look too nice and white, and carries it to the bus. The driver doubts he means no harm.

Holden Caulfield gives a classmate's mother which false name, borrowed from his dormitory's janitor?

Rudolf Schmidt is really the dorm janitor. Under that name Holden tells the woman her son, a boy he cannot stand, was too modest to accept a nomination for class president.

Which short story does Holden Caulfield call the best in his brother D.B.'s book?

The Secret Goldfish is about a kid who won't let anybody look at his goldfish because he bought it with his own money. Holden thinks his brother has been wasting that talent ever since.

Holden Caulfield puts off a hired prostitute by claiming a recent operation on his what?

Clavichord is what he says, though that is a keyboard instrument, not a body part. He pays her the agreed five dollars anyway, and she insists the price was ten.

After the hotel pimp punches him, Holden Caulfield staggers about pretending he has which injury?

A bullet in his gut is the fantasy: he pictures tracking the man down with an automatic, then being bandaged by a girl he likes. He ends by blaming the movies for ruining him.

Which Shakespeare tragedy does Holden Caulfield discuss with a teacher he meets over breakfast?

Romeo and Juliet thrills her, which Holden finds awkward given its love scenes. He tells her the death that bothered him most was Mercutio's, not the lovers'.

Which rare record does Holden Caulfield buy as a present, then drop and smash to pieces?

Little Shirley Beans is a song about a girl too embarrassed to leave the house after losing her two front teeth. His sister asks for the broken pieces and says she is saving them.

Which husband-and-wife acting duo star in the Broadway play Holden Caulfield takes his date to see?

The Lunts, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, were Broadway's star couple. Holden picks their show, I Know My Love, because he knows his date will be impressed, not because he likes actors.

Holden Caulfield's date rents a short skirt at Radio City so that the pair can do what?

Ice skate is the plan, and both of them are terrible at it. Holden suspects she mainly wanted to be seen in the little rented skirt, and the afternoon ends in a blazing row.

Which make of British sports car does Holden Caulfield say his older brother D.B. has bought?

Jaguar: Holden offers the car as proof that D.B. has plenty of dough these days. He means it as a complaint, since he thinks his brother sold his talent to pay for it.

What does Holden Caulfield's well-off father do for a living in New York?

Corporation lawyer is the job, and Holden wants no part of it. When his sister suggests the law for him too, he says lawyers mostly drink martinis and play golf.

Which Elkton Hills boy jumped from a window rather than take back an insult to a bully?

James Castle was wearing a turtleneck sweater borrowed from Holden when he died. He is who comes to Holden's mind when he is challenged to name one thing he really likes.

Which psychoanalyst is credited with the line on dying nobly or living humbly that Holden Caulfield is handed?

Wilhelm Stekel, an early follower of Freud, is the name Holden's old teacher gives for it. Holden pockets the paper politely, though he would rather sleep off his headache than weigh the warning.

What do two small brothers ask Holden Caulfield to help them find, only to bolt before reaching it?

The mummies lie down a dark corridor of tombs, and Holden explains how the bodies were preserved as he leads the way. The boys lose their nerve and run off, leaving him there alone.

What is Holden Caulfield's little sister dragging when she announces she is running away with him?

A suitcase, and it is Holden's old one. Seeing her ready to follow him is what makes him give up the idea of leaving, and he promises her he is not going anywhere.

Which animals do Holden Caulfield and his little sister stop to watch at the Central Park Zoo?

Sea lions are the stop they make, with his furious sister trailing behind and refusing to speak to him or come near. The walk is his way of coaxing her out of a sulk.

At the end of his story, what does Holden Caulfield say he is expected to do next?

Go back to school is the plan, and a psychoanalyst keeps asking whether he will apply himself this time. Holden calls it a stupid question, since nobody knows what they will do until they do it.

What does Holden Caulfield say is the best thing about the Museum of Natural History?

Nothing in it ever moves: the Eskimo is still fishing and the birds are still flying south on every visit. The only thing that would be different, Holden says, is you.

Which biblical figures does Holden Caulfield, a self-described 'sort of an atheist', say annoy him?

The Disciples, he complains, kept letting Jesus down while he was alive. His favourite Bible figure after Jesus is a lunatic who lives among graves and cuts himself with stones.

In the 1940s teenage slang Holden Caulfield uses, what does it mean to 'shoot the bull'?

Make small talk, simply to pass the hours, is the meaning. A 1959 study in the journal American Speech judged Holden's slang an authentic record of how teenagers then talked.

Besides Elkton Hills, which school did Holden Caulfield attend before the one that expels him?

Whooton is where his student adviser, an older boy, did little but give the younger ones talks about sex. Holden left that school early as well.

Holden Caulfield's boarding school stands in the fictional town of Agerstown in which state?

Pennsylvania it is: the school's adverts boast of molding boys into clear-thinking young men since 1888, a claim Holden mocks in his opening chapter.

Holden Caulfield begins his story on a hill, skipping his school's big game in which sport?

Football draws practically the whole school to the game against rival Saxon Hall, yet Holden only watches the crowd from a distance. He is trying to feel some kind of goodbye for the place.

At which Normandy beach was J. D. Salinger, future author of The Catcher in the Rye, on D-Day?

Utah is where Salinger served on D-Day with the 12th Infantry Regiment. He went on to see the Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge before his novel was finished.

Which director was refused permission by J. D. Salinger to put The Catcher in the Rye on Broadway?

Elia Kazan asked in 1961 and was turned down. Later bids for the film rights from Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein were never even passed on to Salinger.

J. D. Salinger once imagined playing Holden Caulfield on stage opposite which former child star?

Margaret O'Brien, the MGM child star then in her teens, was his pick in a letter from the early 1950s. If he could not play Holden himself, he wrote, they should forget about it.

Which US president called The Catcher in the Rye a 'marvelous book' that had inspired him?

George H. W. Bush named it among the books that inspired him, an unlikely fan for a novel that spent two decades as the most censored in American schools. He was already 27 when it came out.

Which magazine printed 'I'm Crazy', the first published story narrated by Holden Caulfield, in 1945?

Collier's ran it three days before Christmas 1945, billing it as a heart-warming story. Its scenes of Holden leaving prep school were reworked for the novel six years later.

In Salinger's 1944 story 'Last Day of the Last Furlough', Holden Caulfield is reported as what?

Missing in action is the news his soldier brother Vincent brings. Salinger later set that aside, making Holden a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in the late 1940s.

Which Story magazine editor ran the Columbia writing class that J. D. Salinger took in 1939?

Whit Burnett saw nothing special in Salinger until weeks before the course ended, when he 'suddenly came to life' and finished three stories. Burnett then accepted one, 'The Young Folks', for Story.

In which Mel Gibson thriller must his character buy The Catcher in the Rye whenever he sees it?

Conspiracy Theory gives Gibson's paranoid cab driver a compulsion he cannot explain: he has been programmed to buy the novel, and owns copies he has never read.

Which hard rock band released a song called 'Catcher in the Rye' on its long-delayed album in 2008?

Guns N' Roses put the song on Chinese Democracy. Axl Rose wrote it after watching a documentary about a murderer fixated on the novel, and meant it partly as a criticism of the book.

J. D. Salinger left New York in 1953 for which small New Hampshire town, his home until he died?

Cornish stayed his home for more than half a century, and he died there in 2010 at 91. He kept writing in those years but published nothing after 1965.