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50 free Lolita trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Lolita trivia quiz covers Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel as a literary and publishing phenomenon: how it was written, refused, printed in Paris, denounced, banned, and finally became one of the best-selling and most argued-over books of the century. The easy questions handle the author, the narrator's pseudonym, Dolores Haze's real name, the coined word that entered the dictionary and the two directors who filmed it. From there it moves into the text: the Poe poem behind Annabel Leigh, the anagram hidden in a character's name, the town of Ramsdale, and how the foreword gives away the ending. The harder end is for Nabokov readers: the working title, the size of the first printing, the critic who called it dull three times, the MP whose career it damaged, the real 1948 kidnapping the book cites, the Broadway flop and the Swedish-language opera. The questions treat the subject matter seriously; the book is a study of a predator's self-justification, and the quiz reflects that. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the novel, its author, its publishers and its adaptations, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our classic novels, banned books and Stanley Kubrick quizzes are natural next stops.
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Q 01Who wrote the 1955 novel Lolita?
Vladimir Nabokov
He wrote it in English, his third language, after producing his first nine novels in his mother tongue while living in Berlin.
Q 02Under what pseudonym does the narrator of Lolita write his memoir?
Humbert Humbert
The doubled name recalls Poe's 'William Wilson', a tale about a man haunted by his double, just as the narrator is shadowed by a rival.
Q 03What is the real name of the girl the narrator calls 'Lolita'?
Dolores Haze
'Lolita' is the Spanish diminutive of Dolores; critics note the book gives us her feelings only in glimpses through the narrator's self-serving account.
Q 04How old is the girl the narrator calls Lolita when he first meets her?
12
Kubrick later pointed out that Sue Lyon was 13 when cast, closer to the book's 'twelve and a half' than many audiences assumed.
Q 05The narrator's mother-tongue subject as a professor is the literature of which country?
France
His textbook comparing French and English writers lets the novel pack in Flaubert, Proust, Rabelais, Baudelaire and Ronsard.
Q 06Lolita opens with a fictitious foreword by which invented editor of psychology books?
John Ray Jr.
He explains that the memoirist died of heart disease in jail while awaiting trial, and reveals the girl's fate as well.
Q 07The narrator's teenage first love, Annabel Leigh, takes her name from a poem by which writer?
Edgar Allan Poe
'Annabel Lee' is quoted throughout the novel, and its lines are borrowed to describe the narrator's first love.
Q 08Nabokov originally intended to call the novel what?
The Kingdom by the Sea
The phrase comes from Poe's 'Annabel Lee', the poem the narrator keeps returning to.
Q 09In which fictional New England town does the narrator lodge with the Haze family in 1947?
Ramsdale
He later enrols Dolores at a school in Beardsley, and finds her again years afterwards in the mining town of Coalmont.
Q 10How does Charlotte Haze, the narrator's wife, die?
Hit by a car while running to post letters
She had just read his diary; the drunk driver responsible pays for her funeral out of remorse.
Q 11Which famous playwright turns out to have taken Dolores from the hospital in Elphinstone?
Clare Quilty
The narrator eventually tracks him to his mansion and shoots him; the drug-addled scene is the memoir's 'unspecified crime'.
Q 12The character name Vivian Darkbloom, Quilty's co-author, is an anagram of what?
Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov had planned to publish anonymously and left the anagram as a wink to alert readers.
Q 13According to the foreword, how does Dolores die?
In childbirth on Christmas Day 1952
Q 21Which country banned Lolita for two years from December 1956?
France
The Minister of the Interior acted after the British Home Office had ordered customs to seize copies; Argentina, Australia, Belgium and others also banned it.
Q 22Which American publisher finally issued Lolita in the United States in August 1958?
G. P. Putnam's Sons
It went into a third printing within days; the Cincinnati Public Library banned it a month later.
Q 23Lolita was the first novel since which book to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks in the US?
Gone with the Wind
By 2005 the novel was estimated to have sold 50 million copies worldwide.
She is married to Dick Schiller and living in Coalmont when the narrator sees her for the last time.
Q 14Which coined word from Lolita went on to enter most dictionaries?
Nymphet
Its rarer male counterpart, 'faunlet', never caught on; the book is full of multilingual puns and anagrams.
Q 15Nabokov finished Lolita on 6 December 1953, after how many years of work?
5
Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar Straus and Doubleday all turned it down before he looked abroad.
Q 16Who stopped Nabokov when he tried to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita?
His wife Véra
Véra was also his typist, editor, translator, agent, chauffeur and teaching stand-in.
Q 17Lolita was first published in 1955 in which city?
Paris
Turned down by every major US house, it appeared as a pair of green paperbacks 'swarming with typographical errors'.
Q 18Which publisher, better known for erotica, issued the first edition of Lolita?
Olympia Press
Maurice Girodias's imprint also first printed Naked Lunch, The Ginger Man and Story of O; three-quarters of its list was described as 'pornographic trash'.
Q 19Which English novelist rescued Lolita by naming it a best book of 1955 in the Sunday Times?
Graham Greene
The Sunday Express editor John Gordon shot back that it was 'the filthiest book I have ever read', and British customs began seizing copies.
Q 20How many copies were in the first 1955 printing of Lolita?
5,000
It sold out without a single substantial review until an English novelist's end-of-year list.
Q 24Which New York Times critic dismissed Lolita as 'dull, dull, dull'?
Orville Prescott
The review had no effect on sales; Lionel Trilling instead warned that readers were being seduced into condoning the narrator.
Q 25The 1959 British edition of Lolita helped end which Conservative MP and publisher's career?
Nigel Nicolson
He was a partner in Weidenfeld & Nicolson, the firm that finally published the book in London.
Q 26Nabokov said the 'initial shiver of inspiration' for Lolita came from a newspaper story about what?
An ape that drew the bars of its cage
The animal in the Jardin des Plantes produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal, he wrote in his 1956 afterword.
Q 27Under what English title was Nabokov's 1939 novella anticipating Lolita published in 1986?
The Enchanter
Volshebnik already used the idea of a molester and his victim checking into a hotel as father and daughter.
Q 28The novel itself mentions the real 1948 kidnapping of Sally Horner by which 50-year-old mechanic?
Frank La Salle
He travelled with the 11-year-old across several states for 21 months, claiming to be an FBI agent; scholar Alexander Dolinin argues she was a prototype for Dolores.
Q 29Nabokov's own 1967 translation of Lolita, published in New York by Phaedra, was into which language?
Russian
It contains his only known published instance of translating his own poetry from English into Russian, and he mourned finding his 'wonderful Russian language' had withered.
Q 30Nabokov taught literature from 1948 to 1959 at which university?
Cornell
His friend and colleague there, Morris Bishop, warned him against signing with the erotica publisher who took the book.