Lolita

This novel, published in 1955, is largely set in New England. The central characters are Humbert Humbert, a French academic born in 1910, and Dolores Haze, born in 1935. He encounters this girl (Lolita) in 1947 in the fictional town of Ramsdale and quickly becomes infatuated with her. When her mother is knocked down and killed, he contrives to become her guardian. They travel around the country together, driving all day and staying in motels. After a year of touring the United States, Humbert takes Dolores to settle in the fictional New England town of Beardsley and enrols her in a school. On a second road trip, Dolores abandons Humbert while in a town in Texas.

The author, Vladimir Nabokov (born 22 April 1899), grew up in Saint Petersburg. He was trilingual (reading and speaking English, French and Russian) from a young age. In 1916 his first book (a poetry collection) was published. While still a schoolboy, his family, being quite aristocratic, were forced to flee to Crimea by the October Revolution. From there, they moved to England after the war. Nabokov went to university in Cambridge and graduated in 1922. In the meantime, his parents had relocated to Berlin and Nabokov followed them there after his graduation. He lived there until 1937 when he and his Jewish wife moved to France as refugees from Nazi persecution. From there, they again emigrated in 1940, this time to the United States. He obtained American citizenship in 1945 and established himself in an academic career, teaching Russian and English literature at Cornell from 1948 to 1959. Due to the financial success of Lolita, he was able to move to Switzerland and focus on writing.He died there in 1977 while working on his ninth novel in English. His corpus includes ten novels written in Russian between 1926 and 1939; nine novels in English between 1941 and 1977; numerous poetry collections; and several plays.

Humbert Humbert, the narrator of the novel, has a jealous, rather hypocritical, dislike for the boy who first had sex with Dolores while she was at camp. Several years later, he mentions the boy's activities to a neighbour, mother of Phyllis Chatfield, one of Dolores's friends:
“I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and  Camp Q. Yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges?”
Mrs Chatfield’s response was one of horror:
”For shame, for shame, Mr Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea.”
There must have been thousands of villains killed in the First World War but many of them are remembered as innocent because of their deaths in action.