Today is a big day in book history, as far as the EDIWTB blog is concerned, for two reasons:
1) On this day in 1955, Lolita was first published — my favorite book of all time (minus the ending – what’s up with endings? No one does them right!). Here’s a little backstory on Lolita, courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac:
Nabokov started thinking about the novel when he was still a new immigrant to the United States, struggling to support his wife and son as a professor of Russian and English literature. He began working seriously in the summer of 1951, while he and his wife drove to Colorado in their Oldsmobile station wagon. He said he loved writing in the car because it was the quietest place in America. The following winter, he began doing research on young girls, traveling on city buses to learn current slang, writing down popular song titles and phrases from teen magazines and Girl Scout manuals. As he grew more and more excited about the book, he was miserable that he had to do anything else. He wrote to his friend, Edmund Wilson, "I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching."
He finished the novel in 1953, but when he sent the draft to friends, most of them were horrified, and told him that he could never publish it. It was rejected by all the major publishing houses in the United States, so he finally had it brought out anonymously in France by a publisher who specialized in pornography. He played around with different titles, including "The Kingdom by the Sea," but in the end the novel was called Lolita (1955). He later said that the novel was, in part, about his love affair with the English language.
After a few years of controversy, it was published in the United States in 1958, and went on to become a best-seller and a movie. Nabokov had put off writing it for so many years partly because he was afraid that it wouldn’t make any money, but in the end it was the success of Lolita that allowed him to retire from teaching. He moved with his wife to Switzerland and spent the rest of his life writing novels in the top floor of a luxurious hotel.
2) Today (well, actually yesterday) is the birthday of tour de force author Jonathan Franzen, who wrote The Corrections. Again, from The Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of novelist Jonathan Franzen, born in Western Springs, Illinois (1959). He spent years working on a novel while his marriage ended, his father died, and he quit smoking. After five years he had written hundreds of pages, but he still didn’t know what story he was telling. Then a good friend, David Foster Wallace, published a book (Infinite Jest) to great acclaim. It was the jolt Franzen needed. He threw away everything but a chapter about a cruise ship and started over. He wrote the rest of the book in less than a year.
The Corrections was published in 2001. It’s about a family falling apart and was a big success. His most recent book is a collection of essays: How to Be Alone (2002).
Franzen also famously skirmished with Oprah after she chose The Corrections for her book club and he requested that the big "O" sticker not be placed on copies of his book. (In the end, he opted not to be part of her book club).
I am a big fan of The Corrections and Jonathan Franzen and wish him a very happy birthday.