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Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. The novel is famous both for its innovative style and for its controversial subject. The novel's unreliable narrator and main character, Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European emigré living in the United States, becomes sexually obsessed with a pubescent girl.
Lolita is also the title of two motion pictures based on the novel. The name has also become a slang term for a sexually attractive or precocious young girl. For more information about these non-literary meanings of the term, see the end of this article.
A scholar, Humbert leaves Europe for America and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after meeting her, and spying her twelve-year-old daughter (Dolores Haze, affectionately shortened to Lo, or Lolita) sunbathing in the garden. Charlotte Haze, a lonely widow, becomes Humbert's unwitting pawn in his silent quest to be near her young daughter. Charlotte soon marries Humbert. Some time later, while searching Humbert's room, she finds his diary, containing Humbert's written confessions of indifference to his new wife and impassioned lust for her daughter. She runs away in disgust and, in fleeing the home, is hit and killed by a passing car.
Humbert begins traveling around the United States, from one motel to another, in the company of Lolita, with whom he is now having a sexual relationship. This relationship ends when a rival adult suitor, Clare Quilty, convinces Lolita to leave Humbert and run away with him.
At the end of the novel, when Humbert briefly reunites with Lolita, it is only to give her the money she has requested so that she and her new husband can make a fresh start in Alaska. Humbert realizes that he still wants her, not because she was one of the class of young girls he refers to as nymphets, but because he has truly fallen in love with her.
The novel is a tragi-comedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries.
Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European emigré, and his clever, humorous narrative style immediately endears him to the reader. Humbert is both lovable and reprehensible, and the combination of sympathy and repulsion that he evokes in the reader is at the core of the book's genius. Humbert fancies himself a great artist, but he lacks something that Nabokov himself characterizes as essential: curiosity. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity".
Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press , a publisher of " erotica" in Paris, which published Lolita in 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual U.S. publication on August 18August 18 is the 230th day of the year (231st in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 135 days remaining. Events 293 BC Oldest known Roman temple to Venus founded, institution of Vinalia Rustica begins. 1587 Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Gov, 1958Events January January 1 Treaty of Rome founding the EU is implemented January 4 Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from its orbit (launched on October 4 1957) January 8 14 year old Bobby Fischer wins the United States Chess Championship January 18 Armed Lumbee Nat, by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century.