When he was 18 years of age, Vladimir Nabokov’s aristocratic family fled in advance of the Russian revolution. First to Crimea, where they thought they would lay low for a while until things return to normal, and then to England when it became obvious they would not. A child of two languages, Nabokov wrote many works in English, including the one he would be most famous for, about a thirteen year-old “nymphet” (a word of Nabokov’s coinage) and her middle-aged professor-lover.

On this day, August 18, in 1958 Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is published in the U.S. by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. With a quiet reception in the famously liberal France, and an outright ban in England, the American publisher had no way to prepare for the run on Lolita copies right afters its publishing — Lolita joined Gone With the Wind as the only books to sell 100,000 copies within three weeks.

What was Lolita really about? Many took it at face value, considering it a novel of either pedophilia or, conversely, of a precocious child taking advantage of a broken man. Others noted Nabokov’s many allusions to other classic works of fiction, including those by Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, and many of the French masters, and argued the entire work was a metaphor his Nabokov’s love of novels (a point which Nabokov himself corrected — a metaphor for his love of the English language.) Debate still continues, but the work itself is widely considered one of the best books written in English.