What Inspired 'Lolita'?

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” This disturbing sentence from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is often misremembered as the novel’s opening line. The 1955 book in fact begins with a mock foreword, written by one John Ray Jr., PhD, of the fictional Widworth, Massachusetts. Ray has ostensibly been commissioned by the lawyer of the now deceased Humbert Humbert, the pedophile narrator of Nabokov’s tale, to edit his client’s manuscript. Ray assures us that “save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details,” the manuscript is “preserved intact,” before going on to deride those “old fashioned readers” who try to deduce from such a narrative the “‘real’ people beyond the ‘true’ story.”