Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was a wealthy asthmatic who spent his twenties in Paris society and his last fourteen years in a cork-lined bedroom writing In Search of Lost Time, seven volumes and three thousand pages, of which Swann’s Way, refused by every publisher and printed at his own expense in 1913, is the first. The novel is the story of a man recovering his life through involuntary memory, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, and it contains the century’s fullest studies of love, jealousy, snobbery and time. He died in 1922 correcting the proofs of the fifth volume.