Lolita. by Nabokov, Vladimir - 1955

Paris: The Olympia Press, 1955. First edition, association copy of Nabokov's masterpiece from the library of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Elizabeth Bishop. First issue with the price of 900 francs on the rear panel of each volume. Octavo, 2 volumes, original green wrappers. In near fine condition with light rubbing, some toning to the extremities. Bishop and Nabokov both gained international recognition for their mastery of prose in America in the mid-20th century. It was not until Nabokov began writing in the English language that he gained a reputation as a great writer, and it was the present volume that catapulted his career. Referred to by Dwight Garner as "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century", Elizabeth Bishop's first book North & South, was first published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry. She would go on to become the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Nabokov was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times. Housed in a custom clamshell box. An important association, linking two masters of English prose. "Brilliant One of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year" (New York Times). "Lolita blazes with a perversity of a most original kind, for Mr. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce. Lolita seems an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy" (Atlantic Monthly). The novel became the basis for the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film starring James Mason and Peter Sellers.