Novels, 1955-1962 : Lolita, Pnin, Pale fire, Lolita a screenplay
(Book - Regular Print)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 873-904).

Lolita (1955), Nabokov's single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time. Funny, satiric, poignant, filled with allusions to earlier American writers, it is the "confession" of a middle-aged, sophisticated European emigre's passionate obsession with a 12-year-old American "nymphet," and the story of their wanderings across a late 1940s America of highways and motels. Pnin (1957) is a comic masterpiece about a gentle bald Russian emigre professor in an American college town who is never quite able to master its language, its politics, or its train schedule. Pale Fire (1962) is a tour de force in the form of an ostensibly autobiographical poem by a recently deceased American poet and a critical commentary by an academic who is something other than what he seems.