The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping Of Sally Horner And The Novel That Scandalized The World

"Sarah Weinman, a connoisseur of true crime stories, investigates the 1948 kidnapping and rape of 11-year-old Sally Horner by a convicted pedophile in order to build a convincing case that it served as an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — a claim he denied. Weinman interweaves her report of Sally’s abduction and eventual rescue with Nabokov’s stop-and-go writing of Lolita, whose preoccupation with pedophilia and prepubescent girls she traces in much of his earlier work. In highlighting the horror of both Sally and the fictional Dolores Haze’s ordeals, The Real Lolita not only casts Nabokov’s most famous novel in new light but also gives Sally the posthumous literary acknowledgment she deserves."