My first time with LOLITA

Like many another adolescent in the late 1950's my first time with Lolita was a major disappointment: I was looking for a dirty book, and only found a great one. My first serious encounter with the novel came some years later, when I was teaching freshman composition at Northwestern University, under the directorship of Alfred Appel. My wife and young children and I spent a summer in Yorkshire, at the home of another Northwestern colleague, and I picked up The Annotated Lolita because I was curious about the scholarship of my supervisor. A few days later, I finished the book, dashed to the local bookshop, and purchased everything by Nabokov they had for sale.