Lolita was ready to be submitted to publishers, but there was a catch: Nabokov refused to put his own name to the novel. He asked Katharine White, in the same letter in which he solicited her feedback, whether book publishers would go along with his request. She replied that “from her experience, an author’s identity sooner or later leaked out.” Still, Nabokov wanted to keep his identity secret, for the same reasons that spurred him to burn the manuscript pages of Lolita as he finished them. He believed being publicly associated with such an incendiary book might imperil both his literary and
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