![]() In her book, Weinman explores the extent to which Nabokov pilfered - in current parlance, appropriated - “a real girl’s plight for his fictional masterpiece.” Weinman, a noted editor and writer who specializes in crime stories by often neglected female authors, first wrote about La Salle’s crime and its influence on “Lolita” in a popular 2014 article for the Canadian online magazine Hazlitt. (Constantin Joffe / Conde Nast via Getty Images) Nabokov, a Russian emigré and amateur lepidopterist, drew on his own annual cross-country journeys with his wife, pursuing rare butterflies between his academic commitments at Wellesley and later Cornell. Upon his wife’s death, Humbert abducts his stepdaughter and embarks upon one of literature’s most infamous road trips. ![]() Its morally repellent, charismatic narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile whose obsession with a 12-year-old girl leads him to marry her mother. In Britain and France, copies were seized by customs officers and the book was subsequently banned for two years. Often named the greatest English-language novel of the 20th century, upon its publication in 1955, “Lolita” immediately became one of the century’s most notorious. What are the sources of evil? Or literary inspiration? Can these impulses, toward crime and creation, be twins? These are some of the myriad questions evoked by Sarah Weinman’s riveting account of the 1940s true crime that in part inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” ![]()
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