Read The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated for Free Online

seemsremote today, and was definitively settled in France not long after its publication. I was Nabokov’s student at Cornell in 1953–1954, at a time when most undergraduates did not know he was a writer. Drafted into the army a year later, I was sent overseas to France. On my first pass to Paris I naturally went browsing in a Left Bank bookstore. An array of Olympia Press books, daringly displayed above the counter, seemed most inviting—and there, between copies of
Until She Screams
and
The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe
, I found
Lolita
. Although I thought I knew all of Nabokov’s works in English (and had searched through out-of-print stores to buy each of them), this title was new to me; and its context and format were more than surprising, even if in those innocent pre-Grove Press days the semi-literate wags on fraternity row had dubbed Nabokov’s Literature 311–312 lecture course “Dirty Lit” because of such readings as
Ulysses
and
Madame Bovary
(the keenest campus wits invariably dropped the
B
when mentioning the latter). I brought
Lolita
back to my base, which was situated out in the woods. Passes were hard to get and new Olympia titles were always in demand in the barracks. The appearance of a new girl in town thus caused a minor clamor. “Hey, lemme read your dirty book, man!” insisted “Stockade Clyde” Carr, who had justly earned his sobriquet, and to whose request I acceded at once. “Read it aloud, Stockade,” someone called, and skipping the Foreword, Stockade Clyde began to make his remedial way through the opening paragraph. “ ‘Lo … lita, light … of my life, fire of my … loins. My sin, my soul … Lo-lee-ta: The … tip of the … tongue … taking … a trip …’—
Damn!
” yelled Stockade, throwing the book against the wall. “
It’s God-damn Litachure!!
” Thus the Instant Pornography Test, known in psychological-testing circles as the “IPT.” Although infallible, it has never to my knowledge been used in any court case.
    At a double remove from the usual review media,
Lolita
went generally unnoticed during its first six months. But in the winter of 1956 Graham Greene in England recommended
Lolita
as one of the best books of 1955, incurring the immediate wrath of a columnist in the
Sunday Express
, which moved Greene to respond in
The Spectator
. Under the heading of “Albion” (suggesting a quaint tempest in an old teapot),
The New York Times Book Review
of February 26, 1956, alluded briefly to this exchange, calling
Lolita
“a long French novel” and not mentioning Nabokov by name. Two weeks later, noting “that our mention of it created a flurry of mail,”
The Times
devoted two-thirds of a column to the subject, quoting Greene at some length. Thus began the underground existence of
Lolita
, which became public in the summer of 1957 when the
Anchor Review
in New Yorkdevoted 112 of its pages to Nabokov. Included were an excellent introduction by F. W. Dupee, a long excerpt from the novel, and Nabokov’s Afterword, “On a Book Entitled
Lolita
.” When Putnam’s brought out the American edition in 1958 they were able to dignify their full-page advertisements with an array of statements by respectable and even distinguished literary names, though
Lolita
’s fast climb to the top of the best-seller list was not exclusively the result of their endorsements or the novel’s artistry. “Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine” (to quote John Shade in
Pale Fire
[1. 680]), also creating storms in England and Italy, and in France, where it was banned on three separate occasions. Although it never ran afoul of the law in this country, there were predictably some outraged protests, including an editorial in
The New Republic;
but, since these at best belong to social rather than literary history, they need not be detailed here, with one exception. Orville Prescott’s review in the daily
New York Times
of August 18, 1958, has a charm that