The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

For my mother

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

I want to go home as soon as I can.

—Sally Horner, March 21, 1950