Publication of Lolita

Lolita is a novel by the Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955 by the Olympia Press in Paris after several American publishers declined it. It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, an educated, self-justifying European who becomes obsessed with and abuses a twelve-year-old girl, Dolores Haze. The book provoked controversy and was banned in some countries before an American edition appeared in 1958, becoming a bestseller. Critics have long admired its dazzling prose, its dark irony and the way it exposes the narrator's self-deception, and it is widely ranked among the major English-language novels of the twentieth century. It was adapted for the cinema by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and again by Adrian Lyne in 1997.

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