Which school may have inspired Salinger's Pencey Preparatory Academy?

Valley Forge Military Academy may have inspired Salinger's fictional Pencey Preparatory Academy.

Pencey Prep is the Pennsylvania boarding school from which Holden Caulfield is expelled at the beginning of The Catcher in the Rye. It is fictional, but literary biographers and reference works commonly connect it with Valley Forge Military Academy, the Pennsylvania school J. D. Salinger attended as a teenager. The connection is suggestive rather than an exact one-to-one identification, which is why the question uses “may have inspired.”

The two schools share a Pennsylvania setting and a culture associated with discipline, hierarchy, athletics, and institutional tradition. Holden's description of Pencey is much more cynical: he mocks its advertising, values, and claims to produce exceptional young men. Salinger's own experience at Valley Forge nevertheless provided a plausible real-world background for the fictional school.

Choate Rosemary Hall, Deerfield Academy, and Phillips Exeter Academy are real American preparatory schools, but they are not the school most often identified as Pencey's likely model. Salinger attended Valley Forge Military Academy and later drew on personal experiences when creating Holden's educational world.