At what fictional boarding school does the novel begin?

The novel begins at Pencey Preparatory Academy, the fictional boarding school attended by Holden Caulfield.

Holden narrates the story from a later point, looking back on the events of the previous December. He is sixteen and has just been expelled from Pencey after failing nearly all his subjects. The opening places him on a hill overlooking the school during a football game, deliberately separated from the crowd and already feeling alienated from the world around him.

Pencey is presented as an elite but morally hollow institution, at least through Holden's judgmental and often unreliable perspective. He repeatedly complains about the school's hypocrisy and calls its slogan—claiming that it molds boys into splendid young men—phony. The school therefore establishes one of the novel's central tensions: the gap between respectable appearances and private reality.

Pencey is fictional, although scholars have suggested that Salinger may have drawn inspiration from real preparatory schools, including Valley Forge Military Academy. It is easy to confuse Pencey with other literary schools such as Hailsham or Welton Academy, but those belong to entirely different novels and films.