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 This is a December 1953 review of the then-unpublished Lolita manuscript:

“It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation…. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

Five leading publishers rejected the manuscript:  Doubleday; Farrar, Straus; New Directions; Simon & Schuster; and Viking.  When it was finally published, 55 years ago next month, John Gordon of the Sunday Express denounced it as “about the filthiest book I’ve ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.”  This, about a book that is curiously sexless — where the porn is largely projected onto the book by the mind of the reader.  But that’s okay.  Dorothy Parker described the pretentious Humbert Humbert as a man of “taste and culture.”  The book would seem to be a Rorschach test — or perhaps a mirror.

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On a certain book called The Original of Laura

Nabokov had responded to a Book Review survey asking for authors’ comments on “the three books they most enjoyed this year.” Movingly, Nabokov took the opportunity to inform readers about his condition (he died some seven months later) and his preoccupations — evading the question and instead listing “the three books I read during the three summer months of 1976 while hospitalized in Lausanne.” The first book is Dante’s “Inferno,” in Charles S. Singleton’s literalist translation. The second is “The Butterflies of North America,” by William H. Howe.
But the third, as he wrote, is “ ‘The Original of Laura.’ The not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.”