Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic and essayist, born in the 16th arrondissement of Paris on 10 July 1871. He grew up in a comfortable, cultured family and was troubled by asthma from childhood. As a young man he moved in fashionable Parisian society, wrote articles and sketches, and translated the English critic John Ruskin. In his thirties, after the deaths of his parents, he withdrew increasingly to his rooms and devoted himself to his great work, In Search of Lost Time, a very long novel in seven parts. It follows a narrator through childhood, love, jealousy, society and art, and explores memory, habit, desire and the passing of time with extraordinary patience and wit. Its opening volume appeared in 1913, and later volumes followed, some after his death. Proust died in Paris on 18 November 1922. He is read today as one of the central figures of modern literature, admired for showing how closely a life's inner experience can be observed and recreated in prose.