Vladimir Nabokov: The Velvet Butterfly

Alan Levy

Sep 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The Velvet Butterfly is the third in a series of introductions to some of our major literary figures by the noted cultural journalist and foreign correspondent Alan Levy.

About the author

Alan Levy was born in New York City in 1932 and educated at Brown and Columbia Universities. In 1952, at Brown, he co-wrote an original Brownbrokers musical titled Anything Can Be Fixed with Gill Bach and Porter Woods. In addition, he worked seven years as a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky. Later on, he spent seven years in New York as journalist writing for Life magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times and others. Among personalities he interviewed were W. H. Auden, the Beatles, Fidel Castro, Graham Greene, Václav Havel, Sophia Loren, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Nixon and Ezra Pound.
 
In 1967, Alan Levy moved to Prague with his family, to collaborate on an American version of a musical by Jirí Šlitr and Jirí Suchý.
 
Shortly after, he covered the Prague Spring and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and chronicled the events in Rowboat to Prague, which was published in the United States in 1972. Josef and Zdena Skvoreckys’ Toronto publishing house, 68 Publishers, translated the book into Czech in 1975, which has been smuggled to Czechoslovakia where it became one of the underground classics. It was republished in 1980 as So Many Heroes and translated into numerous languages.