THE BOOK

The protagonist is Humbert Humbert, "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching" despite a forbidden passion for his pre-teen step-daughter. "There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child...".

Although not deriving from an autobiographical obsession, his wife feared the book might get him fired. He considered a pseudonym (like the anagramatic Vivian Calmbrood, a fake English playwright that Nabokov "translated" in the '20s) for the work that eventually liberated him from teaching at age 59 to write and live atop the Palace Hotel in Montreux until his death at 78.