The Sensitivity Era

Seventy years ago, in 1955, Olympia Press published Lolita, the Russian émigré novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous masterpiece. Olympia was a small Paris-based publisher, which specialised in erotica but also brought out avant-garde literature such as Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Nabokov initially had trouble finding an American publisher for his book in the cautious and conservative 1950s when many American publishers were under the pall of McCarthyism. But the industry also featured courageous, progressively minded editors like Walter Minton, president of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which issued the first US edition of Lolita in 1958. Minton’s bet paid off. Lolita sold 100,000 copies in just three weeks; moreover, unlike James Joyce’s Ulysses and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it was never officially banned in the United States.