Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist whose seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time, written between roughly 1909 and his death in 1922, is regarded as one of the founding works of literary modernism and is routinely ranked among the most ambitious novels ever written in any language. His name has become shorthand for the involuntary memory triggered by sensory cues, the so-called Proustian moment.

Born in 1871 in Auteuil on the western edge of Paris to a Catholic physician father and a cultured Jewish mother, Proust grew up in comfort but in chronic ill health, suffering from severe asthma from the age of nine. He studied law and literature at the Sorbonne, served briefly in the French army, and in his twenties became a fixture of the Parisian salons of the Belle Époque, contributing reviews and society pieces to Le Figaro.

After the death of his mother in 1905, Proust withdrew increasingly from public life and devoted himself to the manuscript that would become In Search of Lost Time, working in a cork-lined bedroom in his apartment on Boulevard Haussmann to muffle the noise of Paris. The opening volume Swann's Way appeared at his own expense in 1913; the second volume In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower won the Prix Goncourt in 1919.

Proust died of pneumonia in November 1922 with three of the seven volumes still unpublished; his brother Robert oversaw the posthumous editions of The Prisoner, The Fugitive, and Time Regained.

The name Marcel is the French form of the Latin Marcellus, a diminutive of Marcus, and it carries the sense of little warrior; he wore it as a male given name.