Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust — in full Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust — was a French novelist, literary critic and essayist, born on 10 July 1871 in Auteuil, on the western edge of Paris. He suffered from asthma from childhood.

As a young man he moved in fashionable Parisian society and published criticism, short pieces and French translations of John Ruskin (La Bible d'Amiens and Sésame et les lys); from around 1897 his declining health drew him steadily out of social life, and he spent his final years working largely in seclusion.

His life's work is À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a novel in seven volumes published between 1913 and 1927, the last three posthumously. Its second volume, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, received the Prix Goncourt in 1919 and brought him sudden fame.

Organised around involuntary memory and the passage of time, and written in long, exactingly observed sentences, it is regarded as one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literature. His other books include the early collection Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896) and, published posthumously, the novel Jean Santeuil (1952) and the essays Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954).

Proust died in Paris on 18 November 1922 of bronchitis and pneumonia following a series of asthma attacks.