William C. Carter
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His biography Marcel Proust: A Life was selected as a "Notable Book of 2000" by The New York Times. Harold Bloom has written that Carter is "Proust's definitive biographer" and that his more recent book, Proust in Love, is "a marvelous study of the comic splendor of the great novelist's vision of human Eros and its discontents." He co-produced the award-winning documentary film Marcel Proust: A Writer's Life.
In 2013, Yale University Press published a new edition of the biography and began publishing a revised, annotated edition of Scott Moncrieff's distinguished translation of In Search of Lost Time. Swann's Way appeared in 2013 and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower was published in October 2015. The Gale Group published in 2013 his edition of The Dictionary of Literary Biography volume (371) on Proust. That same year Carter received the Médaille d'Or du Mérite Francophone from the American Delegation of La Renaissance Française.
email: billcart@uab.edu
Nicolas Drogoul
He received his degree in French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and continues to work as a freelance photographer. Nic’s photographs of places (Paris, Illiers-Combray, Cabourg) that inspired Marcel Proust were published in The Dictionary of Literary Biography: Marcel Proust: A Documentary Volume (Gale/Cengage Learning, 2013). The Revue des Deux Mondes, in the June 2013 issue, commemorating the centennial of Swann's Way, characterized Nic’s photographs as “splendid.”
His photographs were featured in the centennial exhibit (November 8-December 31, 2013), commemorating the anniversary of Swann’s Way at the Mervyn H. Sterne Library (UAB) that holds one of the world’s largest collection of books, letters, and documents related to Proust. In addition, his photos of Proust’s France were selected for a special boutique at the Birmingham Museum of Art offering collector’s items related to France during the highly successful Delacroix exhibition that ran from February 22 to May 18, 2014. Two of Nic's photographs taken at Illiers-Combray appear in Benjamin Taylor's book, Proust: The Future's Secret, published by Yale University Press in October 2015. Nic continues to work as William C. Carter’s research assistant for Yale University Press's new annotated edition of In Search of Lost Time.
email: ndrogoul@uab.edu