Lolita

Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound inLolita, 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.Lolitais 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.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. He studied at Trinity College in Cambridge from 1919 to 1923, after his family fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. He spent the next seventeen years after graduating from Trinity living first in Berlin, then Paris, writing primarily in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he returned to the United States where he taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. <b>Lolita</b>'s monumental success allowed him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreaux, Switzerland, where he would die in 1977.