A plaque hangs outside the Ursinus College dorm room where Salinger lived until dropping out after the fall 1938 semester.

COLLEGEVILLE, Pa. — For years, officials at Ursinus College had been trying to figure out how to capitalize on the fact that J.D. Salinger had spent one semester here in fall 1938.

They were hoping to attract publicity for Ursinus and tried everything they could think of to lure Salinger from the secluded world he’d lived in for his final 50 years. They offered to make him a guest lecturer; to build a literary festival around him; to award him an honorary degree. “No response,” said Richard DiFeliciantonio, the vice president for enrollment at the small liberal arts college here. “Absolutely nothing.”

Then Jon Volkmer, an English professor, had an epiphany: they could establish an annual J.D. Salinger Scholarship in creative writing for an incoming freshman and as a bonus, the winner would get to spend the first year at Ursinus in Salinger’s old dorm room. “Any college could offer money,” Volkmer said. “Nobody else could offer Salinger’s room.”

Salinger responds

On Jan. 19, 2006, the college announced the $30,000-a-year Salinger scholarship, and within a week, the writer’s literary representatives were demanding that his name be removed. In retrospect, this was not a big surprise.

All his life, Salinger had done everything possible to protect his privacy from the same stinking phonies who’d so unnerved Holden Caulfield. He removed his photo from the jacket cover of “The Catcher in the Rye” and successfully sued a biographer to prevent the publication of his personal letters.

“Salinger’s representatives sent us a warning; it was only one paragraph, but it was blunt,” DiFeliciantonio said. “They may have used the word ‘exploit.’”

College officials pleaded that they were just trying to help worthy students. “I don’t think they used the term ‘cease and desist,’” DiFeliciantonio said, “although they may have used the word ‘desist.’”

In deference to what some would refer to as Salinger’s artistic sensibilities and others would call his nuttiness, the college changed the name of the scholarship to the Ursinus College Creative Writing Award. But the part about sleeping in Salinger’s room remained. “I mean, we own the room,” said Volkmer. “They couldn’t stop us from that, I don’t think.”

In the next few weeks, Ursinus will announce the sixth annual winner of what is now known here as “The Not the J.D. Salinger scholarship.”

In theory, previous winners who have slept in Salinger’s room — 300 Curtis Hall — should have felt honored and humbled, although in reality it was no bed of roses.

“It’s a pretty tiny room,” said Anton Teubner, a senior who slept there in 2007.

“It is small,” said Logan Metcalf-Kelly, the current occupant. “But I don’t mind sleeping in it.”

“Late at night,” Teubner said, “I’d be in bed and there’d be these drunk freshmen yelling in the hallway: ‘It’s the room, it’s the room.’ Cut into my sleep.”

On the other hand, for the lonely male freshman, there are benefits. “Girls are interested in seeing the inside of Salinger’s room,” Metcalf-Kelly said.

Not much history

The problem is, except for the plaque in the hallway identifying the room, there’s not a lot to see, and scant evidence that one of the great writers of the 20th century spent the first half of his freshman year there. A slanting ceiling makes the room feel even smaller than it is. Instead of curtains for privacy, Metcalf-Kelly has slung a towel over the only window. It’s hard to tell whether the walls are a faded yellow or bright beige. The carpet is so matted, threadbare and cruddy-looking, it does seem possible that Salinger walked on it.

A scholarly assessment of Salinger’s four months at Ursinus would probably conclude that great writers are not necessarily great human beings, and that their behavior in their formative years does not necessarily foreshadow their outsize successes to come.

Salinger wrote a weekly column in the school paper called J.D.S.’s The Skipped Diploma. The writing is so snide and hip and insiderly, it is almost impossible to tell what, if anything, he was trying to say. He was also the paper’s theater critic, but his reviews were mindlessly positive and cloying, particularly when it came to the female roles, and some scholars have speculated that his primary artistic goal was bedding coeds.

If there is one single thing he did at Ursinus that would hint of the perfect short stories to come: “For Esme — With Love and Squalor”; “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”; “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”— no one has unearthed it yet.

Still, for a man who didn’t appear to like much of anything for very long, he seemed to have had a fondness for Ursinus. Compared with his other college experiences — two weeks at New York University and a few creative writing courses at Columbia — Ursinus was as close to an alma mater as he’d get. In her memoir, Margaret, his daughter, wrote that he “had only good things to say about Ursinus and its lack of pretension.”

On March 15, 1963, Salinger wrote to the registrar, requesting a catalog for the family’s baby sitter, “a thoroughly nice young girl,” noting that “I look back with a great deal of pleasure on my own days at Ursinus.”

Writing required

To qualify for the Not the J.D. Salinger scholarship, applicants must submit writing samples. The judges aren’t looking for the person who writes most like Salinger; they’re looking for a person who, like Salinger, writes with a strong, distinctive voice.

That’s a good thing, because there are applicants who have never read Salinger’s books.

“I glanced at them in high school, but never actually read them,” Metcalf-Kelly said.

“I was not a Salinger fan until I came here,” Teubner said.

Metcalf-Kelly believes that if his generation were asked to pick a dorm room to sleep in based on literary merit, many would head for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, where Dave Eggers slept. “I think Eggers’ ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ had the impact on our generation that ‘Catcher in the Rye’ had on its generation,” he said.

“Eggers went to my high school,” said Teubner, the Ursinus senior, who graduated from Lake Forest High.

If Teubner were to pick a literary bed, he would move to Bennington, Vt., where Bret Easton Ellis slept. “I’m not sure that’s typical,” he said. “A lot of kids my age don’t read Ellis anymore. He’s a little old. He was big in the ’90s.”

Callie Ingram, a junior, slept in the Salinger room two years ago. She described “The Catcher in the Rye” as “a good book, but not pivotal.” She still hasn’t opened her copy of “Franny and Zooey.”

If Ingram had to pick a bed, it would be in Knoxville, at the University of Tennessee, where Cormac McCarthy slept. She was particularly moved by “All the Pretty Horses” and “The Road.”

However, if she preferred staying at Ursinus and were willing to settle for rooms occupied by Cormac McCarthy’s niece (class of 2007) or John Updike’s mother (class of 1923), either of those could work, too.