Editing The Crying of Lot 49 (section)

===Vladimir Nabokov===<!-- This section is linked from [[Thomas Pynchon]] -->
Pynchon, like [[Kurt Vonnegut]], was a student at [[Cornell University]], where he probably at least [[Academic audit|audited]] [[Vladimir Nabokov]]'s Literature 312 class. (Nabokov had no recollection of him but Nabokov's wife Véra recalls grading Pynchon's examination papers, thanks only to his handwriting, "half printing, half script".)<ref name="appel">Appel, Alfred Jr.  Interview, published in ''Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature'' '''8,''' No. 2 (spring 1967).  Reprinted in ''Strong Opinions'' (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).</ref>  The year before Pynchon graduated, Nabokov's novel ''[[Lolita]]'' was published in the United States. ''Lolita'' introduced the word "nymphet" to describe a girl between the ages of nine and fourteen, sexually attractive to the [[Hebephilia|hebephilic]] main character, [[Humbert Humbert]] and it was also used in [[Lolita (1962 film)|the novel's adaptation to cinema in 1962]] by [[Stanley Kubrick]]. In the following years, mainstream usage altered the word's meaning to apply to older girls. Perhaps appropriately, Pynchon provides an early example of the modern "nymphet" usage entering the [[wikt:canon|literary canon]]. Serge, the Paranoids' teenage counter-tenor, loses his girlfriend to a middle-aged lawyer. At one point he expresses his [[angst]] in song:

:What chance has a lonely surfer boy
:For the love of a surfer chick,
:With all these Humbert Humbert cats
:Coming on so big and sick?
:For me, my baby was a woman,
:For him she's just another nymphet.