Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita

by Robert Roper

Overview

A unique portrait of Vladimir Nabokov told through the lens of the years he spent in a land that enchanted him, America.

The author of the immortal Lolita and Pale Fire, born to an eminent Russian family, conjures the apotheosis of the high modernist artist: cultured, refined-as European as they come. But Vladimir Nabokov, who came to America fleeing the Nazis, came to think of his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, Nabokov was not only happiest here, but his best work flowed from his response to this exotic land.

Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer's life with charm and insight- covering Nabokov's critical friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, his role at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his serial sojourns into the wilds of the West, undertaken with his wife, Vera, and their son over more than a decade. Nabokov covered more than 200,000 miles as he indulged his other passion: butterfly collecting. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov's work: on two-lane highways and in late-'40s motels and cafés, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov's seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov's broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the mountain breezes and the miles logged, the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov's most beloved books.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632860866
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/09/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	806,012
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Robert Roper's journalism appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Outside, and other publications. He won the 2002 Boardman-Tasker Prize for his book Fatal Mountaineer, and his most recent book, Now the Drum of War, was an Editor's Choice pick in the New York Times Book Review. He has also published several novels. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore and California.
Robert Roper has won awards for his fiction and nonfiction alike. His most recent book, Fatal Mountaineer, a biography of the American climber/philosopher, Willi Unsoeld, won the 2002 Boardman-Tasker Prize given by London's Royal Geographical Society. His works of fiction include Royo County, On Spider Creek, Mexico Days, The Trespassers, and Cuervo Tales; which was a New York Times Notable Book. He has won prizes or grants from the NEA, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Joseph Henry Jackson Competition, and the British Alpine Club. His journalism appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside, Men's Journal, National Geographic, and others. He teaches writing and film at Johns Hopkins, and lives in Baltimore and northern California.

Editorial Reviews

This most scholarly and mandarin of writers, an incontestable master of his craft, has been parsed and chronicled to death…So my first thought when I set eyes on Robert Roper's Nabokov in America: On the Road to "Lolita" was, "Is this book necessary?" Let me say, then, right off, that Nabokov in America—a scholarly romp that should engage admirers of Nabokov as well as fans of first-rate literary sleuthing—is not only necessary, it's exhilarating…Roper…comes to Nabokov as a generalist, with no credentials other than a 50-year passion for the man and his work. He is conversant with most of the secondary literature and refers to it as he sees fit, without bogging down the narrative. And he is almost as attentive to detail as Nabokov himself…Determined not to entangle himself in the vast edifice of documentation that has grown around Nabokov, Roper casts his account as a travelogue, one that is also a work of serious criticism, while bringing us singularly close to this writer, his indefatigable and endlessly capable wife, and their talented but restless son…All in all, this is as seductive and engaging a book as I have come across in a while, one I daresay would have brought a gleam of enjoyment even to Nabokov's gimlet eye.

The New York Times Book Review - Daphne Merkin

…fascinating…Robert Roper argues that Nabokov's "claim to greatness rests most solidly" on his American books, and gives us an evocative portrait of the novelist in the United States that's pungent with small, revealing Nabokovian details…Mr. Roper has succeeded in making a persuasive case for the essential role America played both in shaping Lolita and helping to configure the gyroscopic spin of Nabokov's later career.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

"An unmitigated delight. There’s something immensely appealing about the Nabokovs as a family unit, their lives centered on the production of the great man’s work--which Dmitri translated and Véra abetted in a thousand ways--but also buoyed by mutual admiration. Like Stacy Schiff, Mr. Roper writes about them with warmth and humor, in a relaxed yet snappy style . . . A stimulating book, and not just because of Mr. Roper’s amiable manner and lively prose." —Wall Street Journal

"Roper, rather stunningly, puts Nabokov, the Russian emigre, fully in America . . . One of the best of all biographical studies of the author." —Editor's Choice, Buffalo News

"Fascinating. . . A persuasive case for the essential role America played [in] the gyroscopic spin of Nabokov’s later career." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Nabokov in America is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject." —Washington Post

"A learned, intense, and yet approachable book . . . Roper provides a powerful argument for the role America played in shaping one of the 20th century’s literary giants." —Boston Globe

"In this enjoyable new biography of his American years, [Roper] follows the author of Lolita and Pale Fire on a 20-year journey across America . . . A fresh look at Nabokov's writing and literary associations, including his contentious friendship with Edmund Wilson. It's a great read." —San Jose Mercury News

"Compelling and oddly comic, this tale of the Nabokovs and their life in America is fascinating reading . . . Roper has done a crisp and inspired job exploring this momentous literary figure and his place as a strange piece of 20th-century Americana." —starred review, Library Journal

From the Publisher

★ 05/01/2015
Compelling and oddly comic, this tale of the Nabokovs and their life in America is fascinating reading. For those who grew up in the post-Lolita era, Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) lurks in the literary shadows, a perverse amalgam of intellect, artistry, and predilection dressed in tweed. An air of predatory professorial pathos arose around the Russian genius after the sensation of his novel caught the American fancy. But the truth is, Nabokov was much more normal and quite a bit more interesting than that media-inspired myth. Roper (Now the Drum of War; Fatal Mountaineer) excellently puts the story into the context of postrevolutionary Russia, pre-World War II Germany and France, and postwar America. The body of the work follows Nabokov as he acclimates to America and begins to discern in his new surroundings the seeds of what will blossom into his most famous (and infamous) work. Yet, looming just under the surface of this description is what amounts to a literary "love story" between Nabokov and critic Edmund Wilson. The two men meet fairly early on and develop a great friendship that flourishes for years through a wildly inspiring correspondence but comes to a tragic end in Roper's telling in part as Wilson grows exhausted by the Russian's ego. VERDICT Roper has done a crisp and inspired job exploring this momentous literary figure and his place as a strange piece of 20th-century Americana. A definite purchase for academic libraries and public libraries with a literary readership.—Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

Library Journal

2015-03-28
The Russian writer chased butterflies, and fame, in America. When Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) arrived in New York in 1940, fleeing war-torn Europe, he was a struggling writer who hoped to make a living from college teaching. Two decades later, after the American publication of Lolita in 1958, he returned to Europe a literary star. In this fresh and engaging biography, biographer, novelist, and critic Roper (Writing and Film/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, 2008, etc.) traces the trajectory of his career, friendships, and family life, as well as his indefatigable passion for butterflies. Drawing judiciously on Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) and Stacy Schiff's biography of Vera Nabokov (1999), as well as the writer's correspondence, Roper illuminates such works as Pnin, Speak, Memory, and Pale Fire. Foremost among Nabokov's new American friends was eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson, a trusted reader, who was instrumental in forging publishing connections. Although the friendship eventually ended in bitterness, Roper sees the two men as kindred spirits: "literary out to their fingertips, contentious know-it-alls; sons of upper-class families, their fathers distinguished jurists involved in politics; lovers of Proust, Joyce, Pushkin." Because of Wilson's stewardship, Nabokov found that "cultured, powerful people were magically available to him." Fame, though, did not come quickly. Moving from one teaching job to another—Stanford, Wellesley, Harvard, Cornell—gave Nabokov, Vera, and their son ample opportunity to mount butterfly-hunting expeditions that resulted in a huge collection, which Nabokov donated to the American Museum of National History. Roper traces those journeys, illustrating the book with his own photographs of motor courts where the family stopped and various landscapes that they explored during their 200,000 miles of travels. Although Roper could well have shortened his excerpts from Nabokov's works and letters, they support his assessment of the writer as "an extremely talented fellow" but not, in every piece of writing, a genius.

Kirkus Reviews