August 18

In literary history

• 1958Vladimir Nabokov published Lolita in America after five major publishers had rejected it and it had already been circulating in Paris for three years on green Olympia Press paperbacks. It sold one hundred thousand copies in three weeks, the fastest since Gone with the Wind.

Writers born on August 18

• Elsa Morante (1912)

The Daily Canon for August 18

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877).