French novelist, author of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–27) — the seven-volume, roughly 3,000-page novel that is, with Ulysses, one of the two defining works of European literary modernism. Proust's life before the novel was that of a minor man of letters in the Faubourg Saint-Germain salons — essays, translations of Ruskin, a first novel (Jean Santeuil) abandoned — until asthma, the death of his parents, and his retreat into the famous cork-lined bedroom at 102 boulevard Haussmann opened the space in which La Recherche was composed.
The novel turns on the narrator Marcel's attempt to understand why his life has failed to become what he wanted, and discovers in involuntary memory — the madeleine dipped in tea, the uneven paving-stones — the means by which the past is not remembered but recovered, in its full sensory actuality, outside the order of linear time. The book ends (in Time Regained, 1927) with Marcel understanding, at last, that he must write the novel we have just read. In between: the Dreyfus affair, the rise and fall of Swann and Odette's marriage, the Baron de Charlus's homosexual descent, Albertine's captivity and death, the dissolution of the aristocracy Marcel had worshipped as a boy — all of it held in a prose of unparalleled syntactic elaboration.
His treatment of homosexuality (male in Charlus, female in Albertine) and of Jewishness (in Swann, in the Dreyfus affair) is among the most sustained in literature before the second World War. He did not live to correct the last three volumes, which are slightly more unfinished than the earlier ones — a fact that matters less than one might expect.