William Forrester is a character who keeps himself locked in an appartment and not interact with people. A Pulitzer-prize winning author who helps Jamal Wallace walk the correct path towards writing. Forrester moves back to his homeland of Scotland, where he dies of cancer. He leaves Jamal his apartment and a manuscript of his second and final novel, 'Sunset'. It is to be published by Jamal after he has written a foreword.
Although William Forrester is a fictitious character, there are some noticeable parallels between his life and that of the American author J. D. Salinger:
- Both Forrester and Salinger are notoriously reclusive authors.
- In the movie Forrester blocked a biography of himself that the character Prof. Robert Crawford was going to have published. Salinger did the same thing through a lawsuit against Ian Hamilton.
- Both also only wrote one book that is wildly popular: Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Forrester's Avalon Landing
- In his Glass family stories, Salinger's narrator, Buddy Glass, is obsessed with his dead older brother Seymour. In the movie, Jamal, discussing Forrester's novel, tells Forrester that he thinks there was somebody else. Forrester also has a brother who is dead.
