French novelist, best known for Á LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (Remembrance of Things Past), his autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. The work collected pieces from his childhood, details and fetishes of high class life-style, gossips, memories, recollections of the world he never quite managed to join. The leading motif in the book is the manner in which the present is ineluctably permeated with the past.

Marces Proust was born in Auteuil as the son of an eminent doctor, Adrien Proust, and his wife, Jeanne Weil who was from a well-to-do Alsation Jewish family. He attended the Lycée Condorcet (1882-1889) and in spite of his severe asthma did his one year military service at Orléans. He studied then law at Sorbonne at the École des Sciences Politiques, and published his first works PORTRAITS DE PEINTRES and LES PLAISIRS ET LES JOURS in 1896. Proust's unpublished works from this period, JEAN SANTEUIL and CONTRE-SAINTE BEUVE, an attack of the biographical criticism of Sainte-Beuve, were discovered in the 1950s.

From 1895 to 1899 Proust worked on an autobiographical novel that remained unfinished. His earliest love affairs, which had been heterosexual, changed later into homosexual affairs. Among them was Alfred Agostelli, who was married and was killed in an air accident. To the age of 35 Proust lived the life of a snob and social climber in the salons, although he worked for a short time as a lawyer and was also active in the Dreyfuss affair like Émile Zola and other artists and intellectuals.

Proust suffered from asthma throughout his life and was looked after by his mother. When his father did in 1903 and his mother in 1905 Proust withdrew gradually from society, lived in a sound-proof flat, on the Boulevard Haussmann, and devoted himself to writing and introspection. From 1910 he spent much time in his bedroom, often sleeping in the day and working in the night.

In 1912 Proust produced the first volume of his sevenpart major work, Remembrance of Things Past. The second book, which was delayed by the WW I, appered in 1919, and the next parts made him finally internationally famous. The massive work occupied the last decade of his life. Proust managed to complete the last novels before his death.

The narrator in the book is Marcel, who is not Proust but resembles him in many ways. At the end he is preparing to write a novel which is like the one presented just to the reader. Marcel's childhood memories starts to flow when he tastes a madeleine cace dipped in linden tea such as he was given as a child. The narration follows the lives of three familes, Marcel's own, the aristocratic de Guermantes and the family of the Jewish bohemian dilettante Swann. Among the characters are faithless cocotte Odette, whom Swann marries, homosexual Baron de Charlus, Dutchess, Mme de Villeparisis, Robert Saint-Loup and Marcel's great love Albertine, who is perhaps lesbian and who dies in a riding accident.

Proust is generally considered pioneer of modern novel. His works influenced widely authors in different countries, among them Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Proust died on November 18, 1922.

For further reading: Marcel Proust by S. Beckett (1931); Proust's Way by F. Mauriac (1950); Proust A. Maurois (1950); Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust by M.L. Miller (1956); Marcel Proust by R.H. Baker (1958); A Reading of Proust by W. Fowlie (1964); Proust's Narrative Technique by B.G. Rogers (1965); A Readers Handbook to Proust by P.A. Spalding (1975); Marcel Proust by G. Painter (1978, 2 vols.); A Readers Guide to Remembrance of Things Past by T. Kilmartin (1983)

See: Colette, Isaiah Berlin, André Maurois: The Quest for Proust

Selected works:

• PORTRAITS DE PEINTRES, 1896
• LES PLAISIRS ET LES JOURS, 1896 - Pleasures and Regrets
• Á LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU, 1913-27 - Remembrance of Things Past - DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ SWANN - Swann's Way - Á´LOMBRE DES JEUNES FILLES EN FLEUR, 1918-19 - Within the Budding Grove - LE CÔTÉ DE GUERMANTES I-II - The Captive (2 vols.) - Cities of the Plain - Guermantesin tie - SODOME ET GOMORRHE I-II, 1921-22 - LA PRISONNIÈRE, 1923 - ALBERTINE DISPARUE, 1925 - The Sweet Cheat Gone - LE TEMPS RETROUVÉ, 1927 - Time Regained - FILM: Un amour de Swann, 1983, dir. by Volker Schlöndorff
• PASTICHES ET MÉLANGES, 1919
• CHRONIQUES, 1892-1921
• JEAN SANTEUIL, 1927 (unfinished) - transl.
• Letters, 1948
• Marcel Proust: A Selection from His Miscellaneouis Writings, 1948
• The Maxims of Marcel Proust, 1948
• CONTRE SAINTE-BEUVE, 1954 - On Art and Literature
• Marcel Proust: Letters to His Mother, 1958
• Selected Letters, 1958
• Selected Letters, 1981-89 (3 vols.)