Marcel Proust Biography

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognised as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and "À la recherche du temps perdu" as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.

Bibliography:

• Pleasures and Days (Les plaisirs et les jours; illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire, preface by Anatole France, and four piano works by Reynaldo Hahn) (1896)
• In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu published in seven volumes, previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–1927)
• Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann, sometimes translated as The Way by Swann's) (1913)
• In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, also translated as Within a Budding Grove) (1919)
• The Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes originally published in two volumes) (1920/1921)
• Sodom and Gomorrah (Sodome et Gomorrhe originally published in two volumes, sometimes translated as Cities of the Plain) (1921/1922)
• The Prisoner (La Prisonnière, also translated as The Captive) (1923)
• The Fugitive (Albertine disparue, also titled La Fugitive, sometimes translated as The Sweet Cheat Gone or Albertine Gone) (1925)
• Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé, also translated as Finding Time Again and The Past Recaptured) (1927)
• Pastiches, or The Lemoine Affair (Pastiches et mélanges – a novella) (1919)
• Jean Santeuil (three volumes published posthumously 1952)
• Against Sainte-Beuve (Contre Sainte-Beuve: suivi de Nouveaux mélanges) (published posthumously 1954)