Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

Marcel was born in the Paris suburb of Auteuil. His father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was one of France’s most distinguished scientists. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was a well-educated woman who loved the great classic writers of the 17th century, especially Molière and Racine. Marcel’s only sibling, Robert, was born in 1873.

The hypersensitive Marcel suffered all his life from a number of ailments, especially asthma. Although he earned university degrees in philosophy and law, he always knew that he wanted to be a writer. In 1910, he had his bedroom lined with cork to block out the deafening noise of daytime Paris because he slept during the day and wrote through the night, after returning home from some of Paris’s most exclusive salons. The city’s most famous recluse called himself an owl because he wrote while listening to his “nocturnal Muse.”

Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, was published in November 1913 and was headed for a fourth printing when World War I broke out. Proust continued to write, incorporating the unprecedented conflict into his story of contemporary French society. In 1919, Within a Budding Grove was published and won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize. The final three years of his life saw the publication of The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah. The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained were published posthumously. The novel’s main themes are time and memory and the power of art to withstand the destructive forces of time.