But Holden won over the young, especially the 1960s generation who saw themselves in the disaffected preppy, according to the cultural critic Morris Dickstein. “The skepticism, the belief in the purity of the soul against the tawdry, trashy culture plays very well in the counterculture and post-counterculture generation,” said Mr. Dickstein, who teaches at the Graduate Center of the University of the City of New York. Today, “I wouldn’t say we have a more gullible youth culture, but it may be more of a joining or togetherness culture.”

The culture is also more competitive. These days, teenagers seem more interested in getting into Harvard than in flunking out of Pencey Prep. Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter of Hogwarts than by the smirking manager of Pencey’s fencing team (who was lame enough to lose the team’s equipment on the subway, after all). Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world  like Harry  not the beautiful losers who reject it.

Image HARRYS PLACE A nerd conqueror wins out over a smirking malcontent.

Perhaps Holden would not have felt quite so alone if he were growing up today. After all, Mr. Salinger was writing long before the rise of a multibillion-dollar cultural-entertainment complex largely catering to the taste of teenage boys. These days, adults may lament the slasher movies and dumb sex comedies that have taken over the multiplex, but back then teenagers found themselves stranded between adult things and childish pleasures.

As Stephanie Savage, an executive producer of the “Gossip Girl” television series, told National Public Radio last year, in Holden’s world “you can either go to the carousel in Central Park, or you can choose the Wicker Bar. You can have a skating date, or you can have a prostitute come up to your hotel room. There’s really not that sense of teen culture that there is now.”

Some critics say that if Holden is less popular these days, the fault lies with our own impatience with the idea of a lifelong quest for identity and meaning that Holden represents.

Barbara Feinberg, an expert on children’s literature who has observed numerous class discussions of “Catcher,” pointed to a story about a Holden-loving loser in the Onion headlined “Search for Self Called Off After 38 Years.”