Lolita is divided into two parts and 69 chapters. It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 to a Swiss father and an English mother in Paris, who is obsessed with young girls, whom he refers to as "Nymphet". Humbert suggests that this obsession results from the death of a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh (a deliberate play by Nabokov on the poem "Annabel Lee", by Humbert's favorite poet Edgar Allan Poe which also involves a dead girl and her left behind lover). After an unsuccessful marriage to a Polish doctor's adult daughter, Valeria, Humbert moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, in 1947 to write. He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze, a widow. While Charlotte tours him around the house, he meets her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo and L), with whom—partially due to her uncanny resemblance to Annabel—he immediately becomes infatuated. Humbert stays at the house only to remain near her. While he is obsessed with Lolita, he disdains her crassness and preoccupation with contemporary American popular culture, such as teen movies and comic books.
While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, tells him that he must either marry her or move out. Humbert agrees to marry Charlotte in order to continue living near Lolita. Charlotte is oblivious to Humbert's distaste for her, as well as his lust for Lolita, until she reads his diary. Upon learning of Humbert's true feelings and intentions, Charlotte plans to flee with Lolita and threatens to expose Humbert as a "detestable, abominable, criminal fraud". Fate intervenes on Humbert's behalf, however; as she runs across the street in a state of shock, she is struck and killed by a passing car.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, pretending that Charlotte is ill at an invented hospital. Rather than return to Charlotte's home (out of fear that the neighbors will be suspicious), he takes Lolita to a hotel. Humbert gives her sleeping pills (which he names Vitamin X) and leaves in their room, telling her to go to bed. As he waits for the pills to work, he wanders through the hotel and meets a man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert excuses himself from the strange conversation and returns to the room. There, he attempts to molest Lolita (climbing into her bed instead of his cot), but the sedative is too mild, his "security...a sham one". Instead, she initiates sex the next morning. He discovers that he is not her first lover, as she had relations with a female tent-mate the previous summer, and had sex with a boy at Camp Q. Later, Humbert reveals to Lolita that Charlotte is actually dead; Lolita now has no choice but to accept her stepfather into her life on his terms for she has "absolutely nowhere else to go".
Lolita and Humbert drive around the country, moving from state to state and motel to motel. He sees the necessity of maintaining a common base of guilt to keep their relations secret and wants denial to become second nature for Lolita; he tells her if he is arrested, she will "become a ward of the Department of Public Welfare", losing all her clothes and presents. Later he bribes her for sexual favors, though he knows that she does not reciprocate his love and shares none of his interests. After a year touring North America, the two settle down in another New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in Beardsley School for girls. Humbert is very possessive and strict, forbidding Lolita to take part in after-school activities or to associate with boys; most of the townspeople, however, see this as the action of a loving and concerned, while old-fashioned parent.
