Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita was first published in the U.S. on this day, August 18, in 1958. The novel was originally written in English and first published in Paris in 1955. Nabokov was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator and entomologist. Born in Russia, he wrote his first nine novels in Russian.

During the 1940s, as a research fellow in zoology, he was responsible for organizing the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Read more (Wikipedia)