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Posted on by Paul

Salinger’s tombstone and all

I recently finished re-reading J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”. I first read it about a million years ago. It was published in 1951.

Salinger’s narrator is the anxious and depressed 16-year-old Holden Caulfield. Holden mentions that his parents are leaning toward having him “psychoanalyzed and all” because his “failure to apply himself” has flunked him out of a half-dozen private schools. Old Jerry admitted his book was “sort of” autobiographical.

There’s a part where Holden has been kicked out of his latest school after failing every subject except English, and is killing time waiting to meet his nine-year-old sister outside her midtown Manhattan grade school. While he’s there,

But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it.


Holden rubs the words off with his hand. Still killing time, at the Museum of Natural History he helps two little kids looking for the mummies.

“How come you two guys aren’t in school?” I said. “No school t’day,” the kid that did all the talking said. He was lying, sure as I’m alive, the little bastard. I didn’t have anything to do, though, till old Phoebe showed up, so I helped them find the place where the mummies were.


As they follow the narrow passage leading into the tomb, Holden describes the process by which the Egyptians could be “buried in their tombs for thousands of years and their faces wouldn’t rot or anything.” The kids get spooked and leave.

I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you’d never guess what I saw on the wall. Another “Fuck you.” It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones.

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact.

Given what Jerry/Holden wrote above and the world we live in, it seemed to me that at least one fan would have marked up old Jerry’s tombstone since his death in 2010. If not, maybe it was something I should take on as a mission, in the sense of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” I know it’s crazy, but as a matter of fact sometimes I think of stuff like that. It’s almost like he’s asking for it. I wouldn’t really do it though.

Anyway, I was sure something like that would have made the news, and I googled

defaced “Salinger tombstone”


with the quotation marks just like that. I didn’t get any hits, so I tried other googles. I’m an incredibly fast typist, if you really want to know. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to get carpal tunnel from typing up the thousands of other articles here.

I tried just

“Salinger tombstone”


again with quotes around it. There were about a dozen hits but all the dead people were different Salingers.

Before I gave up, just for fun I tried

Salinger tombstone


no quotes this time. Of course that gave me a million hits, “about 333,000”. But the topmost one was Find A Grave Memorial, at findagrave.com; now we’re getting somewhere. Without any media mentions, the next step in finding out if old Jerry’s tombstone’s been defaced is knowing where he’s buried. Then maybe I could go there and see for myself.

It turns out Find A Grave has an excellent short biography of Salinger, but the jerks yank the rug right out from under my idea of a graveside visit, declaring “Cremated, location of ashes is unknown.” Old Jerry was a notoriously private person, and he has once again avoided his fans.

I probably wouldn’t have done anything anyway.

All quoted material in this article copyright © 1945, 1946, 1951 by J. D. Salinger.
“Catcher in the Rye” still sells over 200,000 copies every year, if you really want to know.

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