In his fifty years as a book publisher, Jason Epstein has edited, among many others, E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, W. H. Auden, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Edmund Wilson, V. S. Pritchett, Jane Jacobs, Elaine Pagels, Barbara Goldsmith, Jean Strouse, David Remnick, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Sister Helen Prejean. He is best known,
however, as an innovator. In 1953, he created Anchor Books, which spurred the so-called quality paperback revolution. Ten years later, he co-founded The New York Review of Books. Inspired by Edmund Wilson and with the help of McGeorge Bundy, he founded the Library of America. In 1989, he created the Reader's Catalog, the precursor of online bookselling. He retired in 1998 after serving for many years as Vice-President and Editorial Director of Random House.
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Iann88@aol.com wrote:

My thanks to Don Johnson for telling us about Epstein's new book which
includes anecdotes about Nabokov. Here they are for those who have not seen
the book. Most of the Nabokov material runs from pages 73-78, but references
to the publication of "Lolita" are scattered throughout the book.

    "I did not find Lolita repulsive, nor did I find it the work of genius
that it has since been called. I admired Nabokov's earlier novels published
by New Directions and preferred their cold precision to the plummy and it
seemed to me rather cruel, if also very funny, Lolita, in which Nabokov
seemed to be congratulating himself on his jokes."

"Later, when he and I became friends, I asked him how the idea for Lolita had
occurred to him. I expected a fanciful answer and was not disappointed. He
told me that one day he, his wife, Vera, and his ten-year-old son, Dmitri,
had been driving home to Ithaca from a butterfly expedition in the Rockies
and stopped for the night in a small Ohio town. Since there was no motel
available they took rooms in the home of a Methodist minister. After dinner,
when the minister and his wife had retired, Vladimir noticed that Dmitri had
disappeared. Vladimir found him under a tree on the  lawn in the arms of the
minister's teenage daughter. Vladimir told me that this encounter aroused his
curiosity about the sexual precocity of teenage American girls, and back in
Ithaca would sit behind them on the school bus, notebook  in hand, recording
their chatter which soon emerged in the pages of his novel. I assumed that
this unlikely detail, like the story of the minister's daughter, was
Vladimir's way of telling me not to ask foolish questions."

Epstein says that Nabokov called Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Gene One Gin.

"On a Sunday afternoon in August in the early l970s we met again accidentally
in the Paris Ritz where I had gone to find a cigar and instead found Vladimir
seated in a corner of the otherwise deserted bar wearing a loud Hawaiian
shirt, pretending to be a boisterous American tourist and addressing in a
booming Midwestern voice Vera and another woman, his French translator."

Phillip Iannarelli
Cleveland, Ohio

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