Pencey Prep may have been based on which Pennsylvania school?

Pencey Prep may have been based on Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania.

The connection is widely drawn from Salinger's own school years. He attended Valley Forge Military Academy near Wayne, Pennsylvania, before entering New York University and later Columbia University. Biographers and commentators have therefore viewed the fictional Pencey as partly inspired by that experience.

The resemblance is not a claim that Pencey is a precise portrait of Valley Forge. In the novel, Pencey is a fictional boarding school where Holden has failed nearly every subject except English. Its headmaster, traditions, social hierarchy, and atmosphere are shaped for the story, while the real academy was a military school with its own distinctive discipline and curriculum.

The wording “may have been based on” matters because Salinger did not present Pencey as a fully documented one-to-one copy. Readers often remember the school as simply “Salinger's school,” but the safer description is that Valley Forge was a likely source of material and atmosphere for the fictional institution.