“The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.”

After circulating Lolita in secret amongst a small circle of New Yorker editors and publishers, Vladamir Nabokov finally placed it at Olympia Press. Three weeks before publication, a slumping and broke Dorothy Parker appeared in The New Yorker with a story entitled “Lolita” about a teenage bride, her jealous mother, and a much older man.