It had a troubled birth; Nabokov almost burned the manuscript of Lolita halfway through and its first publisher was a French pornographic press. But Lolita would go on to become a huge best-seller and the unlikeliest of American classics. Our hero, who goes by the self-mocking name of Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile. He is a highly cultured, endearingly ironic man, and he loathes himself about as much as a human being can, but he loves, and can only love, nubile young girls, whom he calls “nymphets.” Lolita is the story of Humbert’s romance — if that’s the word, which it isn’t—with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze. Their story is as vile and obscene as one can imagine, but Humbert’s voice, an endlessly inventive stream of angry, cosmopolitan invective, elevates it to the level of a tragic, twisted epic.
All-TIME 100 Novels
Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME.
Lolita
Full List
Making the List
A - B
- The Adventures of Augie March
- All the King’s Men
- American Pastoral
- An American Tragedy
- Animal Farm
- Appointment in Samarra
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
- The Assistant
- At Swim-Two-Birds
- Atonement
- Beloved
- The Berlin Stories
- The Big Sleep
- The Blind Assassin
- Blood Meridian
- Brideshead Revisited
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
C - D
F - G
H - I
L - N
O - R
S - T
U - W
About the List
Your Opinion