Word: booked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
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...
Split Personalities. Lolita's atmosphere of mental illness seems pervasive, and at least three publications developed schizoid tendencies from reading the book. The New York Herald Tribune sprouted two critical heads with contradictory views: in the Sunday book magazine, Gene Baro praised "a notable consistency and artistic force," but in a daily review John K. Hutchens decided that Lolita "is not, I think, a distinguished work." In the New York Times Sunday book section Novelist Elizabeth Janeway praised Lolita at length ("One of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year...
...Republic contracted the most visible case of split personality. Critic Conrad Brenner extolled the book for four pages, ended: "Vladimir Nabokov is an artist of the first rank, a writer in the great tradition . . . Lolita is probably the best fiction to come out of this country . . . since Faulkner's burst in the '30s. [Nabokov] may be the most important writer now going in this country." But later, the New Republic used a lead editorial to call Lolita an "obscene chronicle of murder and a child's destruction," somberly explained "what obliges us to differ with...
...bubbly smile on her face. Well may she bubble; 17 months ago she "discovered" Lolita when she read excerpts in the Anchor Review and told an acquaintance about it. The acquaintance, now her fast friend: Walter Minton, president of Putnam's. Minton decided to publish the book, now has a major bestseller on his hands, and Scout Ridgewell has her cut (under a standing offer from Putnam's of a percentage for anyone who discovers "salable" book properties). She is getting the equivalent of 10% of author's royalties for the first year, plus...