Lolita

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Vintage, 1989 - Fiction - 317 pages

Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion 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.

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Lolita; Vintage Books; Vintage international
• Author: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: Vintage, 1989
• ISBN: 0679723161, 9780679723165
• Length: 317 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary