Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a French novelist, born in Paris and asthmatic from childhood. In his twenties he frequented the aristocratic salons he would later anatomize and published a collection of pieces, Pleasures and Days, that led most people to take him for a dilettante. After his mother's death in 1905 he withdrew to a cork-lined bedroom and spent the rest of his life on À la recherche du temps perdu, seven volumes published between 1913 and 1927, the last three after his death. Swann's Way was printed at the author's expense; the second volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1919.