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Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (/ p r uː s t / PROOST; [1] French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (in French – translated in English as Remembrance of Things Past and more recently as In ...
Marcel Proust's groundbreaking 1922 masterpiece In Search of Lost Time is considered daunting and difficult by many, but has been misunderstood and is actually universally appealing, writes...
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Marcel Proust (born July 10, 1871, Auteuil, near Paris, France—died November 18, 1922, Paris) French novelist, author of À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In Search of Lost Time), a seven-volume novel based on Proust’s life told psychologically and allegorically.
Marcel was the son of Adrien Proust, an eminent physician of provincial French Catholic descent, and his wife, Jeanne, née Weil, of a wealthy Jewish family. After a first attack in 1880, he suffered from asthma throughout his life. His childhood holidays were spent at Illiers and Auteuil (which together became the Combray of his novel) or at seaside resorts in Normandy with his maternal grandmother. At the Lycée Condorcet (1882–89) he wrote for class magazines, fell in love with a little girl named Marie de Benardaky in the Champs-Élysées, made friends whose mothers were society hostesses, and was influenced by his philosophy master Alphonse Darlu. He enjoyed the discipline and comradeship of military service at Orléans (1889–90) and studied at the School of Political Sciences, taking licences in law (1893) and in literature (1895). During these student days his thought was influenced by the philosophers Henri Bergson (his cousin by marriage) and Paul Desjardins and by the historian Albert Sorel. Meanwhile, via the bourgeois salons of Madames Straus, Arman de Caillavet, Aubernon, and Madeleine Lemaire, he became an observant habitué of the most exclusive drawing rooms of the nobility.
In 1896 Proust published Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days), a collection of short stories at once precious and profound, most of which had appeared during 1892–93 in the magazines Le Banquet and La Revue Blanche. From 1895 to 1899 he wrote Jean Santeuil, an autobiographical novel that, though unfinished and ill-constructed, showed awakening genius and foreshadowed À la recherche. A gradual disengagement from social life coincided with growing ill health and with his active involvement in the Dreyfus affair of 1897–99, when French politics and society were split by the movement to liberate the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly imprisoned on Devil’s Island as a spy. Proust helped to organize petitions and assisted Dreyfus’s lawyer Labori, courageously defying the risk of social ostracism. (Although Proust was not, in fact, ostracized, the experience helped to crystallize his disillusionment with aristocratic society, which became visible in his novel.)
Proust’s discovery of John Ruskin’s art criticism in 1899 caused him to abandon Jean Santeuil and to seek a new revelation in the beauty of nature and in Gothic architecture, considered as symbols of man confronted with eternity: “Suddenly,” he wrote, “the universe regained in my eyes an immeasurable value.” On this quest he visited Venice (with his mother in May 1900) and the churches of France and translated Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies, with prefaces in which the note of his mature prose is first heard.
The death of Proust’s father in 1903 and of his mother in 1905 left him grief-stricken and alone but financially independent and free to attempt his great novel. At least one early version was written in 1905–06. Another, begun in 1907, was laid aside in October 1908. This had itself been interrupted by a series of brilliant parodies—of Balzac, Flaubert, Renan, Saint-Simon, and others of Proust’s favourite French authors—called “L’Affaire Lemoine” (published in Le Figaro), through which he endeavoured to purge his style of extraneous influences. Then, realizing the need to establish the philosophical basis that his novel had hitherto lacked, he wrote the essay “Contre Sainte-Beuve” (published 1954), attacking the French critic’s view of literature as a pastime of the cultivated intelligence and putting forward his own, in which the artist’s task is to release from the buried world of unconscious memory the ever-living reality to which habit makes us blind. In January 1909 occurred the real-life incident of an involuntary revival of a childhood memory through the taste of tea and a rusk biscuit (which in his novel became madeleine cake); in May the characters of his novel invaded his essay; and in July of this crucial year he began À la recherche du temps perdu. He thought of marrying “a very young and delightful girl” whom he met at Cabourg, a seaside resort in Normandy that became the Balbec of his novel, where he spent summer holidays from 1907 to 1914, but, instead, he retired from the world to write his novel, finishing the first draft in September 1912.
The first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), was refused by the best-selling publishers Fasquelle and Ollendorff and even by the intellectual La Nouvelle Revue Française, under the direction of the novelist André Gide, but was finally issued at the author’s expense in November 1913 by the progressive young publisher Bernard Grasset and met with some success. Proust then planned only two further volumes, the premature appearance of which was fortunately thwarted by his anguish at the flight and death of his secretary Alfred Agostinelli and by the outbreak of World War I.
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Learn about the life and works of Marcel Proust, a French novelist who wrote the seven-volume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Explore his influences, themes, style, and legacy in this comprehensive article.
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A novel by Marcel Proust in seven volumes, published between 1913 and 1927, exploring the themes of memory, love, and society in late 19th- and early 20th-century France. Learn about the plot, structure, reception, and influence of this modernist masterpiece.
- Marcel Proust
- 1913
6 days ago · Learn about the epic novel by Marcel Proust, published in French as À la recherche du temps perdu from 1913 to 1927. The novel is the story of Proust’s own life, told as an allegorical search for truth, and features memorable characters such as Swann, Odette, and Charlus.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
May 21, 2018 · Learn about the life and achievements of Marcel Proust, the French novelist who wrote the monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Find out his personal details, education, career, awards, and publications, as well as his translations and commentaries.
Feb 8, 2023 · February 8, 2023. Marcel Proust writes, with only the faintest irony, that “the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.” Photograph from Alamy. Proust died at...
