Marcel Proust
1871–1922
Biography
Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a French novelist, literary critic and essayist. He was born in the Auteuil quarter of Paris into a wealthy family. His father, Adrien Proust, was a leading pathologist and epidemiologist, and his mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, came from a Jewish family; Proust was brought up in his father's Catholic faith. Severe asthma disrupted his schooling from an early age, and as a young man he moved in the fashionable salons of Paris, whose people and conversations later supplied material for his fiction. His early stories of the 1890s found little public success.
He began his great work, À la recherche du temps perdu, in 1908, when he was in his late thirties. The novel appeared in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, and it follows a narrator who looks back on his life, on childhood, love, jealousy, society and art. It helped to develop the stream-of-consciousness technique and is now counted among the most influential novels of the twentieth century. In the last three years of his life he was confined by illness, but he finished advanced drafts of the closing parts. He died of pneumonia in Paris in November 1922.
The first volume appeared in 1913 as Du côté de chez Swann, and it is Swann's Way, the book credited to him here. The English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, which the book on this site credits, was published in 1922, shortly before Proust's death. Later volumes were put into order and published after his death by his brother Robert, working from Proust's drafts and proofs.
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Books
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff)
A grown man dips a cake in tea and recovers his boyhood in Combray, then the world of Charles Swann and his love for Odette. The first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is a long, rich meditation on time and memory. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.