When Vladimir Nabokov and his family visited James Laughlin at his home in Alta, Utah, the writer, a noted lepidopterist (butterfly expert), lost no time expanding his growing collection of butterflies and moths:
"Nabokov's fiction has never been praised for its compassion; he was single-minded if nothing else. One evening at dusk he returned from his day's excursion saying that during hot pursuit over Bear Gulch he had heard someone groaning most piteously down by the stream.
"'Did you stop?' Laughlin asked him. 'No, I had to get the butterfly.' The next day the corpse of an aged prospector was discovered in what has been renamed, in Nabokov's honor, Dead Man's Gulch."
[Nabokov discovered several species and subspecies of butterfly and served for six years as a research fellow in entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.]
[City Ordinance No. 352 in Pacific Grove, California, makes it a misdemeanor to kill a butterfly.]
Sources
New York Times Review of Books, Aug. 23, 1981
