At a book-author lunch in Manhattan not long ago, Vladimir Nabokov faced a formidable force of 1,000 literature-loving women, and when it was announced that, as a feature of the lunch, one of them had won an autographed copy of Lolita, the excited "ooooh" could be heard all the way to Larchmont. Few novels have stirred up so much critical controversy as Nabokov's account of a middle-aged psychopath's passion for a gum-chewing, teenage "nymphet" (TIME, Sept. 1).
Frederic Babcock, editor of the Chicago Tribune's Magazine of Books, proclaimed: "Lolita is pornography, and...
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