On July 16, “The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger, will turn 75. Commemorating such a nice big number would surely strike its adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, as the absolute nadir of “corny,” but maybe we could use a little corn, as the data centers invade our farmland.

Pour out a Scotch and soda — make that a malted milk — for this spry codger of a novel that’s stayed on the dance floor long past when might be expected, leaping over book bans from the right and dodging cancellation from the left. “Catcher” has somehow inspired artists as disparate as John Guare and Guns N’ Roses, its denunciation of phoniness presaging the social-media demand for “authenticity.”

Though set mostly in the sophisticated precincts of New York City where Salinger was raised but did not remain, “Catcher” might be the purest of the Great American Novels. (Partly because it has never been made into a movie, though everyone from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg tried to secure the rights.)

It’s also one of the dirtiest: ruffling parents and school boards with its fingernail clippings, shaving stubble, blood, flatulence, drunkenness, voyeurism, vulgarity, prostitution, profligacy and slang. Oh so much delectable lost slang.

“Getting a bang,” which does not mean having sex. “Giving the time,” which does. Buddyroo. Flitty. Crumb-bum.

Though these words date the book and make translation challenging, it has never been out of print and has sold over 80 million copies around the world to date, not counting e-books.

Narrated conversationally by Holden as he recuperates in California from a nervous breakdown, “Catcher” describes a three-day mental bender following his expulsion from the fictional Pencey Prep.

Before “On the Road,” before “The Bell Jar,” before “The Graduate” — this novel was a mood. As a child growing up in Salinger’s old neighborhood, I sneaked it for the naughty bits and familiar sights. As an adult, I appreciated how the midcentury glamour lingers — you could still make a Technicolor tourist map of Holden’s moneyed but lonely Manhattan — but the sadness came into sharper focus.

And as a parent to Generation DoorDash, you just cannot believe how much this neglected kid copes with on his own.

Holden gets beat up by a classmate and, later, a pimp; jitterbugs with tourists; ice-skates in Rockefeller Center with a date; takes her to see the Lunts on Broadway; fantasizes that they flee to the country; receives wisdom — and some uncomfortable intimacy — from former teachers; crashes in a hotel and on a bench in Grand Central; gets chummy with nuns and visits the zoo and other landmarks.

Long before trauma trended, Holden mourns his little brother, Allie, dead of leukemia. He scorns his older brother, D.B., for selling out in Hollywood (which J.D. never forgave after Samuel Goldwyn mangled his short story “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” into “My Foolish Heart”) and is saved by their precocious 10-year-old sister, Phoebe, who calls out his depression. “You don’t like anything,” she says.

The novel wasn’t digitized till almost a decade after Salinger’s death in 2010 at 91. He was averse to technology, though an avid watcher of television, and deeply controlling of his publication process.

The oft-copied Lotte Jacobi portrait of him on the first edition, all soulful dark eyes and slight smile over a tweed jacket, remains suspended in uncomfortable amber for those old enough to remember it, like the ethnically insensitive dioramas Holden contemplates at the American Museum of Natural History. Salinger got it removed from the back cover as soon as possible.

“Catcher” was that most American of phenomena, an overnight sensation, and the resultant celebrity spooked its workaholic author right out of town, to suspicious seclusion in Cornish, N.H., where he devoted himself to Vedanta philosophy, Zen Buddhism and his fictional Glass family, dodging reporters and fans who made the pilgrimage.

The red hunting cap Holden wears came to seem especially apt as his creator became prey for journalists and critics. Frank Sinatra had a cold? Salinger topped him with almost six decades of deep freeze (and instead of highballs, sips of his own urine).

You could also see him as a canny and prescient withholder: dropping unexpected short stories to devoted fans like Beyoncé does singles.

There are editions of “Catcher” in Azerbaijani and Vietnamese and covers festooned with those red caps, the ducks he fears for as the park lagoon freezes, or dangling cigarettes. The author adored the first jacket design by his friend E. Michael Mitchell, featuring a rococo carousel horse like the one Phoebe rides; but would come to insist on ones plainer than the Bible, which for some disaffected young people, particularly men, it kind of became.

The darkest examples of this were a string of gunmen in the 1980s, starting with Mark David Chapman, who was reading a copy when arrested for assassinating John Lennon. “This is my statement,” he had written on the flyleaf.

Only the deranged could see “Catcher” as a manifesto for murder, but the novel is impossible to separate from the violence and brotherhood of World War II. Publication of Salinger’s early story about Holden, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” in his preferred venue, The New Yorker, was delayed five years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The novel was further drafted, along with Salinger, in the Army, where serving in the Fourth Infantry Division he saw horrific carnage and survived freezing foxholes in part thanks to the wool socks knit by his beloved mother, Miriam (who’d changed her name from Marie for his Jewish father, Sol). The book would be dedicated to her.

Born Jerome David Salinger on Jan. 1, 1919, nicknamed Sonny and then Jerry, young Salinger carried pages around in his backpack while fighting in the second wave at Utah Beach on D-Day, the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and helping to liberate Dachau. He emerged from a mental hospital after treatment for what was not yet called post-traumatic stress disorder, only to put on his uniform again and help with denazification.

How profoundly disorienting it must have been to return to giddy, bustling Manhattan, where “Catcher in the Rye” was born into a postwar publishing, advertising and retail boom. It was released with fanfare by Little, Brown & Company and selected by the then-mighty and still adorable Book of the Month Club.

The novel’s title has an all-American tinge of baseball that has reverberated weirdly over the decades; W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe,” adapted into the Kevin Costner weepie “Field of Dreams,” had Salinger kidnapped to a baseball field.

But the title comes from Holden’s misquote of a Robert Burns poem, envisioning himself as savior to children about to fall off a cliff as they play. In light of Salinger’s military service, it seems like a fever dream of survivor guilt.

“Unusually brilliant,” Nash K. Burger decreed the novel in The New York Times. Over at the Sunday Book Review, James Stern succumbed to the terrible temptation of writing his own notice in Holden’s all-too-imitable voice of exasperation, his “if you want to know the truth” and “for crying out loud.”

Yet it was a voice with legs. “Everybody’s Caught ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’” noted the headline over a Times article 10 years later about the book’s passionate fans.

Before “young adult” was a publishing category, the novel’s manageable length, confiding tone and theme of alienation made it irresistible for teenagers, a fairly new demographic category to which marketers were eager to sell music, cars, clothes and grooming products.

Teachers became passionate advocates, some losing their jobs for assigning the book, but in recent years more have found Holden a hokey avatar of white male privilege.

And Salinger had, to put it mildly, a complicated relationship with pubescence, starting with his own. (Among his long-suffering biographers are two who assert he suffered from an undescended testicle.)

By the time he was 22, Jerry was romancing Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene the playwright, when she was 16, photographed drinking milk at the Stork Club. (She eventually wed the much older Charlie Chaplin.) After Salinger’s brief marriage to a German eye doctor he met while deployed, the age gaps began widening.

He pursued adolescent girls in his 30s, including one who would become his second wife and mother of his two children, Claire Douglas. Most notoriously, he lived for a time with the writer Joyce Maynard, after spotting her photograph on the cover of The New York Times Magazine for a 1972 autobiographical essay titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” Salinger, at the time, was 53.

And yet he has largely escaped the condemnation visited upon groomers and predators. Maybe because his best-known protagonist and self-described alter ego is an eternal 16 himself. Maybe because the pained memoirs of Maynard and Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, were published before the #MeToo movement. (Margaret’s younger brother, Matt, is the co-executor of Salinger’s literary estate with his widow, Colleen, and will appear at events for the book’s diamond jubilee.)

Or maybe because by retreating and refusing to publish again after William Shawn dedicated almost a whole issue of The New Yorker to “Hapworth 16, 1924” in 1965, Salinger effectively exiled himself. When a Times reporter got him on the phone almost a decade later about some unauthorized collections, it was front-page news.

His magnum opus, his great sequel, was restraint, and when he chose to speak, everyone listened. “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” he said.