Lolita

The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. • With a new introduction by Claire Messud

“The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.

Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Author Biography

VLADIMIR NABOKOV was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. After studying French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, he launched his literary career in Berlin and Paris. In 1940 he moved to the United States, here he achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. Lolita, arguably his most famous novel, was first published, by the Olympia Press, Paris, on September 15, 1955, and became a controversial success. Nabokov died in Montreux Switzerland in 1977.