PROUST, Marcel. - Writer, b. in Paris on 10 July 1871, d. there on 18 Nov. 1922.
His life may be summed up in the assiduous visits to the most elegant Parisian drawing-rooms and in the long years of seclusion, caused by a severe form of asthma, until his death, with only the interruptions of rapid nocturnal excursions through deserted streets, and in the assiduous work of composing his masterpiece: *À la recherche du temps perdu*. The first volume of the series, *Du côté de chez Swann*, rejected by a first publishing house on the advice of A. Gide, who was later to acknowledge his mistake, was courageously published by Grasset (1913); but it was only with the following volume, *À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs*, that P.’s name and fame, sealed by the “Goncourt” prize (1919), spread throughout France and abroad. The publication of this chronicle-novel continued year by year, accompanied by the preparation of collections of essays and articles (*Pastiches et mélanges*, 1919, and *Les plaisirs et les jours*, 1921), giving P. the claim to be a renewer of French prose; thus there appeared: *Le côté de Guermantes* (1920); *Sodome et Gomorrhe* (1922); *La prisonnière* (1923); *Albertine disparue* (1925); *Le temps retrouvé* (1927). More than a “cycle” of novels, it is in reality a long continuous narrative in which the protagonist, following the slow and shifting flow of consciousness, records the events of his life from early childhood to the time when he withdraws from the world to devote himself exclusively to artistic creation. The work conveys in grand frescoes an image of French fin-de-siècle society, of the Third Republic, through its disintegration and transformations, up to the First World War: but because of P.’s predominant attention to the deteriorating and morally censurable and repugnant aspects of that society, the image is perspectivally distorted and obscured. The long and detailed chronicle must always be traced back to the central focus of the protagonist, in whose hypersensitive and meditative interiority every external event acquires definitive color and weight. The personalistic style, which incorporates the subtlest nuances of sensibility and critical thought—understood in the broadest sense—in broadly constructed periods rich in sonorous suggestions, makes of P. the most conspicuous heir of the French and English Symbolist and post-Romantic tradition.