Hunter College Libraries Blog

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is best known for his 1955 novel Lolita, which literary types consider one of the greatest of all modern novels.  In fact, the board of the Modern Library ranked Lolita as number 4 on its list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century.

Lolita is about an affair between a middle-aged man and a 12-year-old girl (although the balance of power between the two is not what you might think).  This subject made the book difficult to publish.  By 1954, Lolita had been turned down by four American publishers, and Nabokov took it to the Olympia Press, based in Paris.  Olympia had published controversial books by the likes of Beckett, Genet, and Burroughs, and also “hastily concocted sex novels with titles like White Thighs, With Open Mouth, and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe.”  Olympia Press chose to present Lolita as the literary novel that it is, when it issued 5,000 copies in France in 1955.  Short of a brown paper wrapper, the book’s presentation was about as subdued as could be; it was printed in two small, cheaply made paper volumes, perhaps to facilitate hiding in a pocket.

No publication reviewed the book, and it might have languished in obscurity, if Graham Greene hadn’t told the London Times at the end of 1955 that he considered Lolita one of the best novels of the year.  As Jeff Edmunds tells it, this prompted the editor of the tabloid Sunday Express to call Lolita filthy and pornographic.  The British government then banned import of the book, and pressured France to ban it too, which the French authorities did in December, 1956.

Lolita remained banned in France for two years, but when someone took two copies into the United States, the U.S. Customs Service allowed them in, in effect clearing the way for an American edition, which Putnam issued in 1958.  (The was a rare instance of the French being more prudish than the Americans.)  Lolita found success in America; the 1958 edition sold 100,000 copies in three weeks, the first novel to do this since Gone With the Wind.

Here is the New York Times fiction bestseller list for May 24, 1959.  Note that Lolita is followed on the list by Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was written in 1928 but banned in the U.S. until 1959.  Something was clearly changing in American mores.

The combination of market success, controversy and s-e-x proved irresistible to Hollywood.  There had to be a movie, and in 1962 MGM released a good one, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring James Mason, Peter Sellers, the inimitable Shelly Winters, and 14-year-old Sue Lyon as Lolita.  The movie toned down the sexuality, but the studio’s ad campaign did not.  (That’s a lollipop in Lolita’s mouth.)

Sue Lyon as Lolita in Kubrick’s 1962 movie.  It’s nice to see that she’s a reader.

James Mason as Humbert Humbert, and Sue Lyon as Lolita.

There was another movie version of Lolita in 1997, and the novel has been in print ever since 1958.  It has assumed a place as a modern classic.

Further Reading

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich.  The Annotated Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich.  Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Michael Marr.  The Two Lolitas.  London, New York: Verso, 2005.

Ellen Pifer, ed.  Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook.  Oxford University Press, 2003.

Harold Bloom, ed.  Lolita.  New York: Chelsea House, 1993.

Alexander D. Nakhimovsky.  An English-Russian Dictionary of Nabokov’s Lolita.  Ann Arbor, Mich.:  Ardis, 1982.