Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( PROOST; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (translated into English as In Search of Lost Time, earlier Remembrance of Things Past), which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927 and totals around 1.25 million words. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.

Proust was born in the Auteuil quarter of Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family. His father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist who studied cholera. His mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was from a prosperous Jewish family. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. From a young age, he struggled with severe asthma attacks which caused him to have a disrupted education. As a young man, Proust cultivated interests in literature and writing while moving in elite Parisian high society salons frequented by aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie. His sexuality and relationships with men were an open secret among his social circles, though Proust himself never publicly acknowledged being homosexual. These social connections provided inspiration and material for his later novel. His first works, including the collection of stories Les plaisirs et les jours, were published in the 1890s to little public success.

In 1908, Proust began work on À la recherche du temps perdu when he was 38. The novel was partially published in his lifetime, with the initial sections appearing in 1913. The first volume was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922 shortly before Proust's death. The remaining volumes were revised and published posthumously by his brother Robert based on Proust's drafts and proofs. La Recherche helped pioneer the stream of consciousness literary technique. The novel's length, complexity and meditation on themes such as desire, artistic creativity, sexuality, and class rendered it a significant work in the development of literary modernism.

Though confined by illness for the last three years of his life, Proust completed advanced drafts of the final parts of La Recherche before his death. He died of pneumonia and pulmonary problems in 1922, aged 51, and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.