Humbert Humbert, a divorced British professor of French literature, travels to small-town America for a teaching position. He allows himself to be swept into a relationship with Charlotte Haze, his widowed and sexually famished landlady, whom he marries in order that he might gain access to her fourteen-year-old daughter—Lolita—with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love, but whose affections shall be appropriated by a devious trickster named Clare Quilty.
