French novelist, best known for À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), his autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. The work collected pieces from Proust's childhood, observations of aristocratic life-style, gossip, recollections of the closed world, where the author never found his place. The key scene is when a madeleine cake (a small, rich cookie-like pastry) enables the narrator to experience the past completely as a simultaneous part of his present existence:

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flowered tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent . . .  (from Swann's Way, in Remembrance of Things Past: Volume One: Swann's Way, Within a Building Grove, The Guermantes Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, New York: Random House, 1934, p. 36)

Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil, near Paris, the son of an eminent doctor, Adrien Proust, and his wife, Jeanne Weil, who was from a well-to-do Alsatian Jewish family. The village of Auteuil, where Proust spent his holidays as a child, was described in an 1855 guidebook as "out of a comic opera." Later Auteuil and Illiers became the Combray of Remembrance of Things Past. Proust was baptized as Catholic, but he never practiced the religion. From 1882 to 1889 Proust attended the Lycée Condorcet, where he felt isolated and misunderstood. "We were rough with him," recalled one of his classmates. In spite of his severe asthma, from which he had suffered since childhood, Proust did his one year military service at Orléans.

Proust studied law at the famous Sorbonne at the École des Sciences Politiques. He contributed to Symbolist magazines and frequented the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the wealthy and aristocratic area of Paris. During the late summer of 1895 he started to write Jean Santeuil, which he later abandoned. In 1896 his first books appeared: Portraits de peintres and Les plaisirs et les jours, with drawings by Madeleine Lemaire. Proust's unpublished texts from this period, Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, an attack on the biographical criticism of Sainte-Beuve, were discovered in the 1950s.

It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses? (Proust in Reading in Bed: Personal Essays on the Glories of Reading, selected and edited by Steven Gilbar, Boston: David R. Godine 1999, p. 43)

From 1895 to 1899 Proust worked on an autobiographical novel that remained unfinished. In 1899 he started to translate the English art critic John Ruskin, without knowing much English. Ruskin was the only English writer he had made the effort to read in the original. Proust had learned English while suffering from a severe attacks of asthma.

Proust's earliest love affairs, which had been heterosexual, changed later into homosexual affairs. Among them was Alfred Agostelli, who was married and was killed in an air accident. According to some sources, Proust frequented Le Cuziat's male brothel, but although these details have fascinated his biographers, they have shed little light on his on his literary accomplishments. André Gide, who had been responsible for Gallimard's rejectiction of Swann's Way in 1912, was one of the rare people with whom Proust had conversations on the subject of homosexuality. When the columnist and  decadent novelist Jean Lorrain, himself a homosexual, not only stated that Proust was a homosexual but that he was having an affair with Lucien Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet, he decided to challenge Lorrain to a duel. Both writers fired shots and missed. Over the years, Proust had more than one duel. In 1920 he challenged the critic Paul Souday.

To the age of 35 Proust lived the life of a snob and social climber in the salons. For a short time he worked as a lawyer and was active in the Dreyfuss affair, like Émile Zola and other artists and intellectuals.

Throughout his life Proust suffered from asthma. He was looked after by his Jewish mother, to whom the writer was – neurotically – attached. After the death of his father in 1903 and mother in 1905, Proust withdrew gradually from high-society circles. Until 1919 Proust lived in a soundproof flat, at the 102 Boulevard Haussmann, where he devoted himself to writing and introspection. From there he first moved to the rue Laurent-Pichat, and then to 44 rue Hamelin, his final residence.

When James Joyce met Proust at a midnight supper in the fashionable Majestic Hotel in May 1922, the two great innovative writers did not speak more than a few words with each other. Joyce recalled: "Proust asked me if I knew the duc de so-and-so. I said, "No." Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such piece of Ulysses. Proust said, "No." And so on. Of course the situation was impossible. Proust's day was just beginning. Mine was at an end." (A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 by Richard Davenport-Hines, Rearsby: W F Howes Ltd., 2006, p. 49)

Proust was financially independent and free to start on his great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, which was influenced by the autobiographies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and François Chateaubriand. Proust's first English translator  C.K. Scott Moncrieff renamed the work Remembrance of Things Past after Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past".

From 1910 Proust spent much time in his bedroom, often sleeping in the day and working at night. "For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V." (Swann's Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, introduction by Lewis Galantiere, New York: Modern Library, 1956, p. 3)

The first volume of Proust's seven-part major work, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), came out in 1912. To gain publicity, he paid for the laudatory reviews on the front page of Le Figaro and the Journal des Debats. This massive story of 3 000 pages occupied the last decade of his life. As a half Jew, he knew what it is to be an outsider, the observed. As an onlooker in society, he turned his wordly experiences into inner experience. Being a Jew and a homosexual at the same time, Proust was involved in both of the most fashionable "vices" of the contemporary French society, which he, "the greatest witness of dejudaized Judaism" interconnected in the "darkest comparison which ever  has been made on behalf of Western Judaism." ('Marcel Proust, Temoin du Judaisme dejudaize,' by J. E. van Praag, in Revue Juive de Geneve, 1937).

Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) was printed at Proust's own expense in November 1913, after Andre Gide advised the Gallimard publishing house to reject it. Swann's Way gained a modest success. Gide made later an offer to publish the subsequent volumes. Another famous writer, E.M. Forster, had his doubts about the whole work: "The book is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythm." (from Aspects of the Novel, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 166; first published by Edward Arnold, 1927) Virginia Woolf read Proust throughout the 1920s. "Oh if I could write like that! I cry," she said to Roger Fry. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, the first English translator of Proust, was a homosexual.  While working as a spy for the British intelligence in Mussolini's Italy, he translated À la recherche du temps and works by Stendhal and Pirandello.

The second volume, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove), which was delayed by the WW I, came out in 1919, but the next parts made Proust finally internationally famous. For a short period, Proust enjoyed his fame and happily threw himself into the social life, dined with his friends and critics at the Ritz, before retiring from the spotlight. When the novelist René Boylesve met him, he was surprised by Proust's worn-out appearance. "He was shabbily dressed, and his tiny, womanish feet were encased in dress shoes. He wore a dilapitated tie and his wide trousers must certainly have been ten years old. . . . He had, in spite of his moustache, the appearance of a Jewess of sixty who might once have been beautiful. . . . Young, old, sick, and feminine—an odd creature." (Proust: A Biography by André Maurois, translated from the French by Gerald Hopkins, New York: Meridian Books, 1958, pp. 311-312)

Proust was still correcting the typescript on his deathbed, but did not manage to finish the final volumes before his death on November 18, 1922. On the suggestion of Jean Cocteau, Proust's brother Robert summoned two days later Man Ray to photograph the body of the writer on his deathbed. The picture, which has been rarely reproduced, first appeared in a magazine bearing the name of another photographer. According to a much repeated story, Proust's last words are found in La Prisonnière (The Captive) in the episode about the death of the writer Bergotte: "They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection." (The Captive, translated from the French by C. H. Scott Moncrieff, New York: Modern Library, 1929, p. 263)

Remembrance of Things Past does not have a clear and continuous plot line. The first two sections can be – and often are – read separately. Marcel, the narrator is not Proust but resembles him in many ways. Marcel is initially ignorant – only slowly does he begin to grasp the essence of the hidden reality. Through a series of loves and disillusionments he finds his true vocation in life. At the end he is preparing to write a novel which is like the one just presented to the reader. Marcel's childhood memories start to flow when he tastes a madeleine cake dipped in tea such as he was given as a child.

Memory takes the central role in the novel and apparently insignificant details prove to be the most important. The first part focuses on Marcel's childhood in Combray. Proust follows the lives of three families, Marcel's own, the aristocratic de Guermantes, and the family of the Jewish Bohemian dilettante Swann. Among the central characters are the faithless cocotte Odette, whom Swann marries, homosexual Baron de Charlus, partly modelled on Count Robert de Montesquiou-Ferensac (1855-1921), an art critic, poet, and essayist, Dutchess, Mme de Villeparisis, Robert Saint-Loup, and Marcel's great love Albertine, who is perhaps lesbian and who dies in a riding accident. The character was partly based on Alfred Agostinelli, Proust's chauffeur, secretary and live-in companion. Proust gradually deepens the portraits of his characters – Vinteuil, a modest piano teacher, turns out to be a great composer. In the climax of the novel the narrator fails to recognize many of his friends because they have changed so much physically during the years. Marcel realizes that his vocation as an artist is to capture the past still alive within us. In the narration past and present merge, reality appears in half-forgotten experiences, and parts of the past are felt differently at different times. It is labour in vain to attempt to recapture the past: "all  all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die." (Swann's Way, p. 61)

Proust is generally considered a pioneer of the modern novel. He made a clear distinction between man and work. The writer is a man of intuition. ". . . a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices," Proust wrote in his answer to the French critic Sainte-Beuve, who tried to understand writers by investigating their private life and environment. (By Way of Sainte-Beuve, translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Hogarth Press, 1984, p. 76)

Proust's work widely influenced authors in different countries, among them Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. His style of long sentences, some of which extend to several pages in length, paved the way for Claude Simon's narrative inventions. Proust later said that he had from the beginning a fixed structure for the whole novel. In the construction he used photographs; the author himself had a penchant for being photographed in uniform. One biographer mentions that Proust liked tight underwear. Perhaps the best sandwich ever, the croque monsieur, was first mentioned in the second volume: "Well, as we came out of the concert, and, on our way back to the hotel, had stopped for a moment on the 'front,' my grandmother and I, for a few words with Mme. de Villeparisis who told us that she had ordered some croque-monsieurs and a dish of creamed eggs for us at the hotel, I saw, a long way away, coming in our direction, the Princesse de Luxembourg . . .  " (from Within A Budding Grove, in Remembrance of Things Past: Volume One, p. 530)

Proust's literary criticism did not attract wide attention until 1954, when Contre Sainte-Beuve came out. He admired Vigny, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle, but Baudelaire was for him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Proust denied Henri Bergson's influence on his work, although they both were much occupied with time and memory, emphasizing duration – time lived every day rather than clock time. The most famous of Proust's essays is that on Flaubert's style, in which he compares Flaubert's grammatical use of tenses to Kant's revolution in philosophy. A prolific writer, Proust also was an avid letter writer.

For further reading: Proust by Samuel Beckett (1931); Four French Novelists by Georges Lemaitre (1938); The Mind of Marcel Proust: A Detailed Interpretation of 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu'  by F.C. Green (1949); Proust's Way by François  Mauriac (1950); Proust: A Portrait of a Genius by André Maurois (1949); Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust by Milton L. Miller (1956); Proust and Literature by Walter A. Strauss (1957); Marcel Proust: A Biography by Richard H. Baker (1958); A Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust by Milton Hindus (1962); A Reading of Proust by W. Fowlie (1964); Proust's Narrative Technique by Brian G. Rogers (1965); Marcel Proust: Critique littéraire by René de Chantal (1967); A Readers Handbook to Proust by P.A. Spalding (1975); Marcel Proust by George D. Painter (1978, 2 vols.); A Readers Guide to Remembrance of Things Past by T. Kilmartin (1983); Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, ed. by Harold Bloom (1987); Proust: Philosophie du roman by Vincent Descombes (1992); Le Temps sensible by Julia Kristeva (1994, as Time and Sense in 1966); Marcel Proust: A Life by Jean-Yves Tadie (2000); Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter (2000); Proust: In the power of photography by Brassai (2001); A Night at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines (2006); Monsieur Proust's Library by Anka Muhlstein (2012); Proust and the Arts, edited by Christie McDonald and François Proulx (2015); Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey by Per Bjørnar Grande (2020); Marie Nordlinger, la muse anglaise de Marcel Proust by Cynthia Gambl (2024); Proust: A Jewish Way by Antoine Compagnon; translated by Jody Gladding (2024)

Selected works:

• Portraits de peintres, 1896
• Les plaisirs et les jours, 1896
  - Pleasures and Regrets (translated by Louise Varèse, 1948)
  - Päivällisvieras ja muita kertomuksia (suom. Annikki Suni, 1983)
• La Bible d'Amiens, 1904 (The Bible of Amiens by John Ruskin; translator)
• Sésame et le lys, 1906 (Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin; translator; preface: Sur la lecture)
  - On Reading: with Sesame and Lilies I: Of Kings' Treasuries by John Ruskin (edited and translated by Damion Searls; foreword by Eric Karples, 2011)
  - Lukija (suomentanut Sampsa Laurinen, 2023)
  
• À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913-27
  - Remembrance of Things Past (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 1922-31; 4 vols., 1934; updated version by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols., 1981) / In Search of Lost Time (rev. translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, D.J. Enright, 6 vols., 1992)
  - Kadonnutta aikaa etsimässä (suom. Pirkko Peltonen, Helvi Nurminen, Inkeri Tuomikoski, Annikki Suni, 1968-2007)
  - films: Un amour de Swann (1983), dir. by Volker Schlöndorff, starring Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti ; Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé, 1999), dir. by Raúl Ruiz, starring Marcello Mazzarella, Emmanuelle Béart,Catherine Deneuve ; La Captive (The Captive) by Chantal Akerman (2000), loosely based on La Prisonnière, starring Stanislas Merhar, Sylvie Testud, Olivia Bonamy, Liliane Rovère, Françoise Bertin, Aurore Clément
• Du côté de chez Swann, 1913 (À la recherche du temps perdu)
  - Swann's Way (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 vols., 1922; translated with an introduction and notes by Lydia Davis, 2003) / A Search for Lost Time: Swann's Way (translated by James Grieve, 1982)
  - Swannin tie (suom. Pirkko Peltonen, Helvi Nurminen ja Inkeri Tuomikoski, 1968-1977)
• À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1918-19 (À la recherche du temps perdu)
  - Within a Budding Grove (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 1924) /  In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated with an introduction and notes by James Grieve, 2004)
  - Kukkaan puhkeavien tyttöjen varjossa 1-2 (suom. Inkeri Tuomikoski, 1979-1982)
• Le Côté de Guermantes, 1920-21 (À la recherche du temps perdu)
  - The Guermantes Way (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 vols., 1925; Mark Treharne, 2004)
  - Guermantesin tie 1-2 (suom. Inkeri Tuomikoski, 1984-1986)
• Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1921-22 (À la recherche du temps perdu)
  - Cities of the Plain (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 vols., 1927) / Sodom and Gomorrah (revised by D.J. Enright, 1992; translated by John Sturrock, 2004)
  - Sodoma ja Gomorra 1-2 (suom. Inkeri Tuomikoski, 1989)
• La Prisonnière, 1923 (À la recherche du temps perdu)
  - The Captive (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 1929)
  - Vanki (suom. Inkeri Tuomikoski, 1994)
• La Fugitive / Albertine disparue, 1925 (À la recherche du temps perdu)
  - The Sweet Cheat Gone (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 1930) / The Fugitive (rev. by D.J. Enright, 1992) / The Fugitive (translated with an introduction and notes by Peter Collier, 2021)
  - Pakenija (suom. Inkeri Tuomikoski, 2003)
• Le Temps retrouvé, 1927 (À la recherche du temps perdu)
  - Time Regained (translated by Andreas Mayor, 1931) / The Past Recaptured (translated by Frederick A. Blossom, 1932)
  - Jälleenlöydetty aika (suom. Annikki Suni, 2007)
• Pastiches et mélanges, 1919
  - The Lemoine Affair (translated by Charlotte Mandell, 2008)
• Chroniques, 1892-1921
• Jean Santeuil, 1927 (unfinished)
  - Jean Santeuil (translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1955)
• Morceaux choisis de Marcel Proust, 1928
• Comment parut "Du côté de chez Swann", 1930 (repub. as Proust et la strategie littéraire, 1954)
• Correspondance générale, 1930-36 (6 vols.)
  - Letters (selection, edited by Mina Curtiss, 1950)
• Marcel Proust: A Selection from His Miscellaneouis Writings, 1948 (edited by Gerard Hopkins)
• À un ami: Correspondance inèdite, 1948
  - Letters to a Friend (translated by Alexander and Elizabeth Henderson, 1949)
• The Maxims of Marcel Proust, 1948 (edited with a translation, by Justin O’Brien)
• Lettres à André Gide, 1949
• Lettres de Marcel Proust à Antoine Bibesco, 1949 
• Correspondance avec sa mère, 1954
  - Letters to His Mother (edited and translated by George D. Painter, 1957)
• Contre Sainte-Beuve: suivi de Nouveaux mélanges, 1954 (preface by Bernard de Fallois)
  - By Way of Sainte-Beuve (translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1958) / Marcel Proust On Art and Literature (translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1958; 2nd ed., 1997)
  - Vastalause Sainte-Beuvelle (suom. Martti Anhava, 2003)
• Choix de lettres, 1965  (edited by Philip Kolb)
• Lettres retrouvés, 1966  (edited by Philip Kolb)
• Textes retrouvés, 1968 (edited by Philip Kolb and Larkin B. Price)
• Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 1970-1993 (vols. 1-21, edited by Philip Kolb)  
• Le Carnet de 1908, 1976 (edited by Philip Kolb)
• Poèmes, 1982 (edited by Claude Francis et Fernande Gontier)
• Selected Letters,  1983-2000 (4 vols., edited by Philip Kolb, translated by Ralph Manheim and Joanna Kilmartin)
• Correspondance, 1912-1922 / Marcel Proust, Gaston Gallimard, 1989 (edited by Pascal Fouché)
• Mon cher petit: lettres à Lucien Daudet, 1895-1897, 1904, 1907, 1908, 1991 (edited by Michel Bonduelle)
• Correspondance avec Daniel Halévy, 1992 (edited by Anne Borrel and Jean-Pierre Halévy)
• Lettres à Madame Scheikévitch, 1993 (preface by René Gillouin)
• The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust, 2001 (compiled and translated by Joachim Neugroschel; foreword by Roger Shattuck)
• Marcel Proust et les Eyragues: deux lettres inédites, 2002 (edited by François Rosset)
• Lettres: 1879-1922, 2004 (selected by Françoise Leriche)
• Letters of Marcel Proust, 2006 (edited by Mina Curtiss)
• Chardin et Rembrandt, 2009 (afterword by Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat)
• Le Mystérieux Correspondant, 2019
  - The Mysterious Correspondent (translated by Charlotte Mandell, 2021)
  
• Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, 2021 (édition de Nathalie Mauriac; préface de Jean-Yves Tadié)
  - The Seventy-five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts (edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer; preface by Jean-Yves Tadié; translated by Sam Taylor, 2023)
• De l'écolier à l'écrivain: travaux de jeunesse (1884-1895), 2022 (édition critique par Luc Fraisse)
  
• The Swann Way, 2023 (new edition; translated by Brian Nelson; edited with an introduction and notes by Adam Watt; original title: Du côté de chez Swann, 1913)
• Finding Time Again, 2023 (translated with an introduction and notes by Ian Patterson; oroginal title: Temps retrouvé, 1927)
  
• The Captive and the Fugitive, 2023 (edited and annotated by William C. Carter; original title: La Prisonnière, 1923)