Alfred Appel, Jr (1934-2009) was a student in Nabokov's European fiction class at Cornell, where he met his wife, Nina. After a PhD on Willa Cather, and his appointment at Northwestern University, Appel turned to Nabokov, focusing especially on his self-consciousness and metafictionality, particularly in "Nabokov's Puppet Show," a long article in the New Republic (14 and 21 January 1967), which became the basis for his memorable Introduction to the Annotated Lolita (1970).
