“You ought to go to a boy's school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.”

American writer

Jerome David Salinger was an American writer of the 20th century, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Born in 1919 and active for much of the mid-century, he became a private and influential literary figure. He published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II. In 1948, The New Yorker published his acclaimed story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and the magazine later carried much of his work. His writing is most closely associated with fiction that captured private, unsettled lives with unusual force.