Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive,devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St.Petersburg, Russia, in I899. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and launched his literary career in Berlin and Paris. In I94O he moved to the United States, where he achieved renown as a novelist, poet,critic, and translator. Lolita, arguably his most famous and controversial novel, was first published by the Olympia Press, Paris,on September I5, I955. Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland in 1977.