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 we do not plan to review it." Other abstainers: the Christian Science Monitor and the Baltimore Sunpapers. But most publications did brace themselves to review the book, and attacks were vehement. The Providence Journal was tempted, but resisted: "After wading along with a kind of fascinated horror through 140,000 words, most readers will probably become bored . . . at times downright sickened . . ." The New York World Telegram's Leslie Hanscom fumed that "there were moments . . . when my whole instinct was to land a Babbitt's righteous punch on the super-civilized nose of the author . . . The novel has a tone which says that, if you cannot swallow its exquisitely distilled sewage with a good appetite, then you'd better go back where you belong and read Elbert Hubbard's Scrapbook."
Damns & Praise. There was much applause, although not all critics seemed sure of what they were clapping about. The Atlantic's Charles Rolo: "One of the funniest of the serious novels I have ever read." Although the Jesuit weekly America was sternly critical, Thomas Molnar cheered in the liberal Catholic weekly, Commonweal: "It has been said that this book has a high literary value; it has much more; a style, an individuality, a brilliance which may yet create a tradition in American letters." Said The New Yorker: "The special class of satire to which 'Lolita' belongs is small but select, and Mr. Nabokov has produced one of its finest examples."
Critic Lionel Trilling praised the book, speculated about its satirical intent: "To what end is a girl-child taught . . . to consider the brightness and fragrance of her hair, and the shape of her body, and her look of readiness for adventure? Why, what other end than that she shall be a really capable airline hostess?" In Esquire, Dorothy Parker succumbed to Nabokov's charms before the reader's eyes: "Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—all right, then—a great book."