Friends and colleagues discouraged Nabokov from publishing Lolita. The chronicle of seduction between the middle-aged Humbert and the pubescent Lolita threatened to be controversial. In the end, it was his wife, Véra, who convinced Nabokov to proceed. Despite the warnings of friends, Lolita appeared in Paris in September 1955, published by a press better known for its pornographic stock than for its efforts to make the works of Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Henry Miller available to a wider reading public. The book's appearance sparked a flurry of publicity in France, where it was banned as a "dangerous book" until 1958. Lolita would eventually be banned in England, Australia, Burma, Belgium, and Austria and, at the local level, in some American communities. The controversy over the book only fueled sales. On September 17, 1958, the Cincinnati Public Library banned Lolita. The following week it reached number one on the bestseller list.

The controversy surrounding the Paris edition of Lolita made potential American publishers nervous. Although many critics had praised the book, no publisher in America was willing to risk fines or jail, and so Lolita did not appear in the United States until 1958—three years after its publication in Paris.

Morris Bishop, Nabokov's close friend and Chairman of Cornell's Department of Romance Literature, found the delay to be of great benefit to all concerned:

"When Lolita appeared in 1955, in Paris, under the imprint of a pornographic press, and was soon banned..., my disquiet sharply increased. I could see in my mind's eye a flood of angry letters from alumni to the President of Cornell: 'Is this the kind of scoundrel you have at Cornell teaching my daughter?'... The explosion I feared did not occur. But I suspect it would have occurred in 1955; the three-years delay in American publication saved Vladimir, and Cornell, and me, from a noisy and perhaps disastrous confrontation."

Nabokov endured a rocky relationship with the first publisher of Lolita, Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris. In this letter Nabokov outlines his plans for preparing an American edition of the controversial novel.

Nabokov writes to his friend Morris Bishop, Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Cornell, urging him to give Lolita a try. He is emphatic about the merits of the novel: "I know that Lolita is my best book so far. I calmly lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art, and that no court could prove it to be 'lewd and libertine'."

To show that Lolita was a literary masterpiece and not a piece of pornography, Jason Epstein at Doubleday proposed that an issue of the Anchor Review be devoted to demonstrating the book's artistic merits. Smothering the novel with academic praise, they theorized, would lessen the likelihood of a court battle upon its publication in America. Nabokov himself contributed the essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita" to stand as an afterword.

The poem Nabokov inserts in Lolita to express Humbert Humbert's grief over Lolita's departure remained one of the author's personal favorites. In this copy of Poems, annotated for public performance, Nabokov has written out the poem on the rear endpapers. The text of the poem differs from that of the first American edition on one point: "Dolores" in the last stanza has been crossed out by Nabokov and changed to "Lolita." The book is further annotated throughout in Nabokov's hand with performance notes on vocal stresses, estimated reading times, and reminders to "pause" after reading each poem.