Pifer, Ellen. Introduction to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook. 2002

While the scandal and controversy sparked by Lolitas provocative subject has never fully abated, the critical acclaim it received during the 1960s and 1970s served to dampen, if not quell, the outrage expressed by some readers (and nonreaders) of the novel. By 1970, a mere dozen years after its American debut, Alfred Appel, Jr., published a hefty scholarly edition, The Annotated Lolita, adding to the novel’s three hundred pages of text nearly as many pages of scholarly notes and commentary.