Episode Details

🎉 Season 11 begins Tuesday, June 9th — The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

Three high-profile crimes. One banned book. Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his pocket. John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan with a copy in his hotel room. Robert John Bardo murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer with one in his backpack — and threw it on a rooftop while running from police. This is the episode where Dan and Jennifer try to figure out what actually happened, and whether J.D. Salinger's novel deserves any of the blame.

Banned Camp is a comedy podcast where we read banned books chapter by chapter — and occasionally go down rabbit holes that make us question everything we thought we knew about literature, murder, and Yoko Ono.

Things To Listen For:

• The inscription Mark David Chapman wrote on his copy of the book the morning of the murder — and what he did with it at sentencing
• Why one of the three cases may have had nothing to do with the book at all — and everything to do with Jodie Foster
• The letter John Hinckley Jr. wrote to Jodie Foster the morning he shot Ronald Reagan
• Why Robert John Bardo threw the book onto a rooftop while fleeing police — and what that says about his actual connection to it
• The quote from J.D. Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski that explains the whole thing in one sentence
• A fact about Strawberry Fields and the Dakota building that will make you see this book differently forever
• Robot gets stuck. Dan has a rug. Beatrix has already been blamed.

Why was The Catcher in the Rye banned? This episode gets at the real answer — the same instinct that blamed this book for three high-profile crimes is the same instinct that removes it from school libraries. It's always easier to point at the object than to look at the person holding it. The book didn't make anyone do anything. That's the part that actually matters.

Source: Much of the research for this episode comes from a great A&E Crime and Investigation piece: Did 'The Catcher in the Rye' Really Inspire Real-Life Killers? — worth reading after you listen.

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