Lolita's Publication History

Lolita's Publication History

This article relates to Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov was born April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He left the country in 1919 and lived in England, Germany, and France before settling in the United States in 1940. In 1961 he relocated to Montreux, Switzerland, where he resided for the remainder of his life and died in 1977.

Nabokov began working on Lolita in 1948, writing much of it during road trips across the United States with his wife Vera and his son Dmitri. Lolita was Nabokov's first book in English and he often said that it was his finest work, although he had so much difficulty with it during the revision process that he came very close to burning the draft in a garden incinerator (Vera stopped him). He began approaching publishers with it in 1954, but the manuscript was repeatedly rejected by US and British publishing houses due to its controversial content. In its rejection letter, a representative of Viking Press wrote, "We would all go to jail if the thing were published."

Many of the editors who read the work recognized its quality as literature but felt hampered by censorship laws. Nabokov himself had his concerns about potential repercussions; he felt he could be arrested on obscenity charges and/or lose his teaching job at Cornell University, and so he originally insisted that Lolita be issued under a pseudonym. (He later relented; friends told him his writing style was so distinctive everyone would recognize him as the work's author regardless.) He also worried about mailing the manuscript, should the US Post Office confiscate it.

The book was eventually accepted for publication by Olympia Press in France (a press that was best known for producing pornography, although Nabokov didn't know that at the time). Lolita was issued in English in 1955, and the first run of 5,000 copies sold out quickly. The book received minimal attention at first, but that changed after a copy made it to England and was read by British writer Graham Greene, who wrote in the Sunday Times that it was one of the best books he'd read that year. Soon thereafter, John Gordon, the editor of the Sunday Express, started a campaign to have the book banned in the UK, calling it the filthiest book he'd ever read and "sheer unrestrained pornography."

The controversy caused the book to gain notoriety and, consequently, popularity, and in 1958, American publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons issued the book in the US. It immediately became a bestseller, with over 100,000 copies purchased in the first three weeks. While never banned in the United States, distribution became illegal in France, the UK, Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Critical reception of Lolita was mostly positive but not universally so. Unsurprisingly, some objected to the content, but that wasn't the only reason a few panned it. In the New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote it was "dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion" and called it "highbrow pornography," while British author Kingsley Amis's review in the Spectator said it was "a Charles Atlas muscle-man of language as opposed to the healthy and useful adult."

To date, Lolita has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. Although the novel continues to be controversial, it regularly appears on "best books" lists such as those published by The Modern Library, NPR, and Time Magazine.

1955 edition of Lolita, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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This article relates to Lolita. It first ran in the July 16, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.