No girl, no Lolita

Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl considers the history of making a cover for Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Lolita, regarded as the most notorious and acclaimed literary work of the 20th century.

In our minds Lolita is associated with a sexualized teen girl, however, as Mary Gaitskill writes in an essay included in the book, Nabokov's book isn't about sex but about the "infernal combination" of love and cruelty.

In fact Nabokov did not want his novel cover to portray a girl or any human form for that matter:

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.

Nabokov was looking for an artist, 

Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

But thanks to Hollywood and Stanley Kubrick's 1962 rendition of the novel, the image of the "girl" has stuck to Lolita.