Vladimir Nabokov

Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian while living in Berlin through the 1920s and '30s, where he met his wife Véra. After moving to the United States he switched to English and became a citizen in 1945, spending over a decade teaching Russian literature at Cornell. His 1955 novel Lolita brought international fame and ranked fourth on Modern Library's list of the century's best novels; Pale Fire followed in 1962 at 53rd on the same list. Trilingual, a seven-time National Book Award finalist, an expert lepidopterist, and a chess-problem composer, he left Cornell in 1959 and eventually settled in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1961. His memoir Speak, Memory placed eighth among the century's greatest nonfiction. Time noted he had "evolved a vivid English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of mood and setting" - a second-language writer who remade English into something strange and exact.