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 pursue the woman s 14-year-old flirtatious daughter, Lolita, with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love, but whose affections shall be thwarted by a devious trickster named Clare Quilty.

Humbert Humbert is a fastidious, middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of US culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the womans teenaged daughter. In fact, his passion for the girl becomes so overwhelming that he is willing to accept Charlottes intimations of marriage just in order to be close to her daughter. Humbert then plots to spend more and more time alone with Lolita, but his pursuit of his obsession soon becomes such that it leaves all their lives damaged.