Censure vs. Censorship
Banned books and the legacy of Lolita

Aug 17, 2021 | Articles, Literature, Recent Articles

By Lauren Hepburn

When Vladimir Nabokov’s best-known and most scandalous novel, Lolita, was published in the USA in 1958, it topped bestsellers lists. Selling 100,000 copies in its first three weeks, it was on its third printing within just a few days, and shot the author to fame in the country. Until then, Nabokov, an émigré in the US, had struggled to find an American publisher bold enough to back his book and had – like James Joyce before him, for the similarly controversial Ulysses – looked to Paris for a supporter. In Nabokov’s case, this was Olympia Press, a publisher which, at the time, had a reputation comparable to that of Mills & Boon. Olympia printed 5,000 copies in 1955, all of which sold. Customs officials in the United Kingdom were soon instructed to seize copies of the book at the border, and a year later it was also banned in France.  

As the remarkable correspondence accompanying this copy of the first edition reveals, Olympia Press defiantly continued printing and selling the book illicitly following the bans, increasing its price by one third, from 900 to 1,200 francs per copy. Its widespread censorship had failed to suppress public appetite for the story of Nabokov’s eloquent, witty protagonist Humbert Humbert, who details in this fictional memoir his paedophilic obsession and relationship with 12-year-old “nymphet”, Dolores (whom he nicknames Lolita).   

First edition, this copy accompanied by a revealing trove of correspondence relating to the censorship of Lolita, as well as works of Jean Genet, and other Olympia Press books, between American screenwriter Theodore Reeves (1910-1973), and Olympia Press’s Ian Shine. Highly revealing of the mechanics of literary censorship from the point of view of an American customer. 1955. £12,500. If you are interested in this item please do not hesitate to contact us.

Early reception of the novel demonstrates how polarising it was. While its sales success proved its popularity, a New York Times review described it as “repulsive . . . highbrow pornography” (qtd. by Cooper, The New Yorker). At the same time as London’s Sunday Times judged it one of the best books of 1955, a reviewer at the Sunday Express considered it “the filthiest book ever read” (qtd. by Boyd, 1991). Although Nabokov had been rejected by multiple American publishers, the man who finally took on Lolita, Walter Minton of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, actively pursued it:

Minton got hold of an excerpt of the novel, via the unlikely agency of an exotic dancer named Rosemary Ridgewell, in whose living room he once fell asleep after a night on the town. “I woke in the middle of the night and there was this story on the table. I started reading. By morning, I knew I had to publish it.” (Cooper, The New Yorker.) 

Perhaps surprisingly, Lolita was never banned in the United States (though it was in Canada). This may have been the legacy of Hon. John M. Woolsey, whose decision in the case The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses”, in 1933, deemed Joyce’s epic nonobscene. Woolsey’s decision is described as “monumental” by Nabokov in Lolita’s foreword.  

As the discipline of psychology and our understanding of sexual abuse and its lasting damage have advanced, Lolita is more categorically recognised as a story of paedophilia and child abuse told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. Dictionary definitions of ‘Lolita’ testify to the historically unsympathetic attitude towards Nabokov’s 12-year-old character: 

‘a precociously seductive girl.’ (merriam-webster.com) 

‘a young girl who has a very sexual appearance or behaves in a very sexual way.’ (dictionary.cambridge.org) 

True to its nature of contrasts and controversy, Lolita is also considered a masterpiece and is taught on curriculums, referenced in diverse artistic works and has been adapted for screen and stage; it is widely regarded as a triumph of late modernist literature.  

Theatrical release poster for the 1962 film Lolita, the first cinematic adaptation.

Though an early admirer of Lolita, literary critic Lionel Trilling nonetheless described the knife-edge any reader of the tale balances upon: 

we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting. (Trilling, qtd. by de la Durantaye, 2005.) 

Humbert Humbert’s irony, sarcasm and intelligence are appealing; we find ourselves somehow complicit in his actions. There are arguments for the literary and even moral value in this. Andrew Koppelman, in a 2005 essay for the Columbia Law Review questioning the legality of literary censorship, quotes American literary critic Wayne C. Booth: 

Booth concedes that even the most malign material, such as the pornographic novels of the sociopath Marquis de Sade, can offer “the by-no-means contemptible gift of providing fodder for ethical discourse, including my own” (Koppelman, 2005). 

Koppelman himself argues that attractive portrayals of perverse characters “are risky, but morally valuable, precisely because they help to dispel the notion that evil is wholly other” (ibid.).  

Telegram Announcing prohibition of the novel ‘Lolita’ in New Zealand, 1959.

In Dirt for Art’s Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson traces the history of books that were once vilified and banned but are now considered canonical literature. Naturally, Lolita features. Ladenson describes the modern shift away from book banning as somewhat objective:

Two ideas which had already been circulating for sometime in the form of avant-garde heresy, gradually became accepted clichés, and then grounds for legal defence. The first is most conveniently encapsulated in the formula ‘art for art’s sake’ the notion that a work of art functions on its own terms, exists in a realm independent of conventional morality, and should therefore be exempt from the strictures of moral judgement. The second is that of ‘realism’. The idea that the function of the work of art may legitimately include and perhaps should even obligatorily take on, the representation of all aspects of life, including the more unpleasant and sordid. Both these ideas now seem obvious, but they were unmentionable for a very long time. (Ladenson, 2007, qtd. by A. G. Noorani, 2007.) 

No matter one’s subjective opinion of Lolita, censorship is inherently at odds with the democratic necessity of freedom of expression. Political commentator A. G. Noorani has framed this more categorically: “Book banning is a civilised form of the vice of book-burning which is a sure symptom of fascim” (ibid.). Whether or not one agrees, Lolita will continue to be published, read, studied, championed and indeed deeply criticised for a long time to come. 

Share this article



Our Latest Catalogue

This spring we bring you a seasonal selection of items fresh to our shelves including spectacular scientific and archaeological discoveries, colourful modern art, political posters, rousing war speeches, and much more.

Recent Articles

Collecting Editioned Prints: Gustav Klimt

Collecting Editioned Prints: Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt, one of the most recognizable artists of the 20th century, scandalized the Viennese establishment and awed his contemporaries with his opulent and erotic nudes. He rose to fame as a leading member of the Vienna Secession, a movement closely related to Art...

Drawn Together – The Synergy Between Writer and Artist

Drawn Together – The Synergy Between Writer and Artist

​Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with an arresting illustration of the White Rabbit and the first thought from Alice is “what is the use of a book… without pictures or conversations?” It’s a great joke as Lewis Carroll shows us his book will have both pictures...