THE TIME

America had won the war but was not yet Americanising the globe with coke 'n' roll.

With his wife at the wheel of their '52 Buick, the family drove through Arizona and Utah - in pursuit of Nabokov's true obsession, the butterflies known as The Blues. Staying in motels, he noted current slang and wrote his book, on 3 x 5 file-index cards, based on this slumbering, time-out America... in between the pianist Truman and the golfing Eisenhower, before Brando and Elvis, when teenagers had not been invented, when Ed Sullivan was deemed charismatic, when fameseekers started blacklists.