Near the end of the novel, Humbert wonders: "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, fifty-year-old mechanic, did to eleven-year-old Sally Horner?" After her mother's death, he takes her on a westward journey across the United States, passing himself off as her father and sexually assaulting her in private. In Lolita, a middle-aged man named Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed with a pre-pubescent girl named Dolores Haze, who he calls Lolita. It was covered all across the country," she said. Weinman and other scholars believe Nabokov likely learned of Horner's story two years earlier, when she was rescued. This photograph of Sally Horner was taken in the summer of 1952, shortly before her death. "There's a notecard in his archives … where he transcribed this wire story, and he then incorporated enough details from that alone," she said. He was struggling with a draft of Lolita when Horner's death made the news. Weinman said she is convinced he used the story as scaffolding for the novel.
Nabokov had been fascinated by the idea of a middle-aged man's sexual obsession with a young girl for many years, and the plot reoccurs in several of his earlier works. Horner's mother repeatedly told the press, "Whatever Sally has done, I can forgive her."Īt age 15, two years after her rescue, Horner died in a car accident. She was sent home to New Jersey - but her difficulties weren't over.Įven though she had been raped, many of the girls at her school considered her a "slut" because she was no longer a virgin, said Weinman.
Horner's family called the FBI, and La Salle was arrested later that day. Sally Horner, age 13, is reunited with her mother Ella Horner at Philadelphia International Airport on Maafter her rescue. "Her little girl wanted a vacation … but Ella couldn't afford it, so she let her daughter go off with the stranger," she said.īy the time her mother realized something was wrong and called the police, the young Horner and La Salle had disappeared. Weinman said Horner's mother, Ella Horner, "had a really tough, hardscrabble life." Sally's father had killed himself, and she was struggling to support their family. He made her tell her mother she was going on vacation with a friend. Horner didn't hear from him for several months, but in June, shortly after she turned 11, La Salle stopped her on her way home from school and convinced her to come with him to Atlantic City, N.J. La Salle told Horner he was an FBI agent, and unless she agreed to follow his instructions and regularly report back to him, she would be sent to a juvenile reformatory. This photograph of Sally Horner was discovered at the Atlantic City boarding house where Frank La Salle held her captive, six weeks after her disappearance.
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