The Real Lolita

Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?' This aside by Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's LOLITA turns out to be an indicator that, hidden in plain sight, a real-life abduction influenced one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Caught trying to steal a notebook from a five-and-dime store in Camden, New Jersey, Sally Horner was abducted by Frank La Salle and taken on an odyssey across America for twenty-one months from Camden to Atlantic City, Baltimore, Dallas and, finally, San Jose, before she was able to escape. All but unknown for fifty years, Sarah Weinman tells Sally's story for the first time using never-before-seen documents and original interviews. The resulting story is a gripping account of survival at the hands of a manipulative abuser, a gritty window into post-Second World War America, and an astonishing new insight into how LOLITA came to be written.