"Lolita is Famous, Not I," Visualized

In Strong Opinions, Nabokov claims that "Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name." This Google Ngram Viewer graph appears to prove him right.

But: If you remove "Vladimir" (making his name maybe 50% less unpronounceable) and remove the smoothing, the Ngram Viewer graph tells a different story: "Lolita" triumphs over Nabokov only in 1955 and 1958, the dates of Lolita's France and American publications. (Big ups to Chris Manon for pointing this out.)


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