Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn
Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn
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Sergeant Salinger

Author: Jerome Charyn

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 8 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/05/2021


Synopsis

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 World War II 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.

About Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. 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. He lives in New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nancy on August 05, 2020

The inimitable Jerome Charyn has turned his pen to probe the transformative war experiences of one of America's most famous writers, J.D. Salinger. Like so many of his generation, WWII left its indelible footprints on Salinger, as manifested in his stories and his troubled life. Charyn begins with S......more

Goodreads review by Lori on January 13, 2021

J. D. Salinger, the highly acclaimed author of " The Catcher in the Rye" never spoke of his years of service during WWII. As a draftee he was assigned to the C.I.C. department of the Army, which was the Counter Intelligence Corps. Here he witnessed every atrocity imaginable, while it was his job to......more

Goodreads review by Jack on January 09, 2021

J.D. Salinger is one of my favorite authors. I read Catcher in the Rye every year around Christmas as I return home from college, the time of year I relate most to Holden. This book is a fictionalization of Salinger’s time in the War and it’s absolutely fascinating. I think context is important to a......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on February 13, 2021

*I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.* Prior to this novel, I knew of J.D. Salinger only as the author of Catcher in the Rye, but in addition to writing a masterpiece, Salinger served in the military during WWII and witnessed many of the horrors of war. Those horrors f......more

Goodreads review by Nads on October 24, 2021

3.5 So i only knew J.D. Salinger to be the author of The Catcher in the Rye which I read a few years back after a friend said it was her favourite book of all time. In this book, Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret sold......more