Weinman attempts to prove that Nabakov pulled a ‘ripped from the headlines’ stunt when he wrote Lolita and chronicles his story alongside that of Sally Horner’s. This book and the historical fiction accounting of Sally Horner’s life- Rust and Stardust- have catapulted the true crime, horror this poor girl endured into the public consciousness, decades after the fact.īut, revisiting this case, also brings up the alleged link between Vladimir Nabakov’s novel, ‘Lolita’ and the real story of Sally Horner. I’ll admit I was not familiar with the Sally Horner case until recently.

The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman is a 2018 Ecco publication. Weinman also writes (albeit less regularly) the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between.

A 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for Reporting, her work has also appeared most recently in New York, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and AirMail, while her fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Weinman writes the twice-monthly Crime column for the New York Times Book Review. She also edited the anthologies Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession (Ecco) Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin). Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, An Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, BuzzFeed, The National Post, Literary Hub, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vulture, and won the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novel’s creation, The Real Lolita casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic. Sally Horner’s story echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the very first time. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horner. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time.

The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman