Facts about Lolita by Nabokov
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Nabokov's protagonist spends roughly one-third of the novel describing his cross-country automobile journey with Dolores across 1950s America while evading detection.
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Nabokov's obsessive revisions during composition created over 2,000 index cards that he shuffled and rearranged to perfect the novel's intricate structure and linguistic patterns.
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Dolores Haze's nickname Lolita appears only 6 times in the entire novel, despite being the book's title and central obsession of narrator Humbert Humbert.
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Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation of Lolita starred 14-year-old Sue Lyon as the titular character, significantly aging her up from the novel's 12-year-old Dolores Haze.
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In 1959, Lolita became a bestseller in America four years after its Paris publication, finally achieving mainstream success when Putnam published an authorized American edition.
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Pale Fire, published in 1962, shares Nabokov's unreliable narrator technique with Lolita but structures the entire novel as a 999-line poem with footnotes rather than prose narrative.
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Nabokov's manuscript was typed on index cards organized in a specially designed index box, allowing him to revise and rearrange passages throughout the novel's composition.
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Humbert Humbert's unreliable narration spans 309 pages in the original 1955 Olympia Press edition, presenting his crimes through elaborate linguistic manipulation and false justifications.
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The novel was rejected by four American publishers before Olympia Press in Paris accepted Lolita for publication in 1955.
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Nabokov completed Lolita in 1953 after beginning the novel in 1949, spending four years writing the controversial masterpiece.