THE BOOK

"Would you be interested in printing a time bomb?"

"In a first-rate work of fiction," Vladimir Nabokov believed, "the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world." Never more so than with Lolita. His masterwork was rejected by all American publishers.

Eventually, the Olympia Press in Paris printed 5,000 copies, sinking without trace until Graham Greene named it among the best three novels of 1955.