Lolita (44 page)
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
Published in 1955,
Lolita
became an instant sensation, establishing Vladimir Nabokov’s reputation as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century. It is an unforgettable and immaculate masterpiece on obsession.
Humbert Humbert, erstwhile college professor, aesthete and tortured romantic is a self-professed ‘nympholept.’ Lolita is the impossibly funny and rapturously beautiful story of Humbert’s total, catastrophic obsession with twelve-year-old Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze. At once prim and predatory, Humbert will stop at nothing in his frenzy to possess his ‘nymphet’, first marrying her mother and then embarking with Lolita on a journey across the American landscape, through roadside diners and five-dollar-a-night motels.
Brimming with gloriously flamboyant word play,
Lolita
displays the unparalleled prose style of a master of the English language in a story that also emerges as a transcendent satire on American consumerism.
Shockingly tender and beautiful,
Lolita
is suffused with an incandescent wit, sensual detail and articulations of longing and lust that are at once exquisite and grotesque.
SECOND VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 1997
Copyright © 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in hardcover, in France by the Olympia Press in 1955 and in the United States by the Putnam Publishing Group, Inc., in 1958. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74402-9