The Foreword is written by the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. He informs the reader that the author—whose pseudonym is Humbert Humbert—of the manuscript “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male” died of heart failure in 1952 while awaiting trial for an unmentioned crime.

The manuscript comes to Ray from the attorney Clarence Choate Clark (Ray’s cousin) who asks Ray to edit it for print. In Ray’s opinion, the book needs few edits; only clues that point to the characters’ real identities need eliminating. Ray explains that there is a corroborated true crime one can look up and that the pseudonymous Mrs. Richard F. Schiller died in childbirth on Christmas of 1952. For Ray, however, the book is more of a psychological case study than a true crime recap. The book, though sensational, makes use of no “four-letter words” and is free of “obscene” elements, despite its objectionable subject matter. Ray himself finds Humbert Humbert’s actions offensive and his opinions to be “ludicrous,” but he values the opinions of psychologists who suggest that more than 12% of American men be sexually attracted to children and that what one may find offensive may merely be abnormal.