Nabokov’s Lolita, the story of a middle-aged man obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl, has fascinated and troubled readers since its publication in 1955. As Weinman shows in her revelatory history of a 1948 kidnapping case, the novel owed as much to actual events as it did to Nabokov’s imagination. The real-life “Lolita” was Sally Horner, eleven-years-old when she was caught stealing by a fifty-year-old man who told her he was an FBI agent. He abducted her and drove her from New Jersey across the country. After twenty-one months, Sally escaped; her kidnapper was arrested in 1950. Acting as both a true-crime reporter and literary sleuth, Weinman tells Horner’s story in detail and shows what Nabokov knew of the case when he wrote his novel and how he disguised that knowledge. Weinman will be in conversation with Laura Lippman, author most recently of Sunburn.
