The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank LaSalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?
Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955)

Sarah Weinman, in The Real Lolita (HarperCollins, 2018) tries to find the influence on the kidnapping Nabokov mentions in his novel on the writing of Lolita.  She makes many references to what Nabokov might have known about it while writing his novel from 1948 to 1953 and one must give her credit for much intelligent guesswork.  Her detailed narrative of Sally Horner's abduction at the age of eleven is a fascinating analysis of parenting in 1940's America, with Sally getting permission from her single mother in Camden, N.J. to go to Atlantic City with Frank La Salle, who Sally thought was an FBI agent and who she convinced her mother was a parent of one of her friends, though Mrs Horner never met La Salle.  La Salle took Sally from Atlantic City to Baltimore to Texas to California, enrolling her in Catholic schools along the way, Weinman convincingly demonstrating that Catholic schools seldom asked questions.  Twenty-one months after her abduction Sally told a friend in a California trailer park that she had been abducted.  La Salle was arrested, extradited to New Jersey, pleaded guilty and sentenced to thirty-five years.  Two years after Sally returned home she was killed in a motorcar accident.

Although there are many interesting similarities to Lolita in the Sally Horner case the similarities and how much Nabokov knew about them, are superficial.  We know that La Salle molested Sally but we know little about the details of their relationship:  neither Sally nor La Salle ever talked about it after La Salle pleaded guilty.  Nabokov's novel Lolita is all about the relationship between Dolores Haze (Lolita) and Humbert Humbert, seen from Humbert's point of view.  Weinman says that Lolita's death is a tragedy but Sally Horner's death is a greater one, because she was real.  But do the two deaths have anything to do with each other?  Does knowing about Sally Horner affect one's reading of Nabokov's novel, adding another layer of complexity to a complicated and brilliant novel, or is it a totally separate and different tragedy? Some people read mostly fiction, some mostly non-fiction; what happens when the two overlap?












































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