Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust (Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel) was born in the countryside of Auteuil, near Paris, in 1871. He studied law, political science, and philosophy. Born into a wealthy, bourgeois family—his father was a renowned doctor—he quickly found himself in the high society circles of the capital and began publishing social articles in various publications. He worked for a time in a library until he discovered his inclination for literature, to which he devoted himself completely, eventually leading to near-total isolation from the outside world: he slept during the day and wrote at night in a cork-lined room. Between 1895 and 1899, he worked on a novel that remained unfinished and was published posthumously in 1952 under the title "Jean Santeuil." He also wrote poems, short stories, articles, and translations. Some of these stories were published in 1896 in the volume "Pleasures and Days," with a preface by Anatole France and illustrations by Madame Lemaire. The lukewarm reception from the public and some plot issues led him to abandon his novel "Jean Santeuil" until around 1907, when he embarked on the multi-volume novel cycle "In Search of Lost Time." The first volume of the cycle, "Swann's Way," which was rejected by several publishers, was published at the author's expense in 1913. It was followed by "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower," which won him the Prix Goncourt and fame in 1918, "The Guermantes Way," in two volumes, in 1920 and 1921, and "Sodom and Gomorrah," also in two volumes, in 1921 and 1922. Asthmatic from a young age, Proust died of pneumonia in 1922. The last three volumes, although completed, were published posthumously under the supervision of his brother Robert: "The Prisoner" in 1923, "The Fugitive/The Disappearance of Albertine" in 1925, and "Time Regained" in 1927. In 1927, "Chronicles," a volume of his published articles, was released. After his death, Proust quickly took his place as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century and one of the most significant critics of his time. His work inspired a vast number of analytical and synthetic studies and influenced writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Claude Simon, and others.