Marcel Proust

Born in 1871 to a wealthy Parisian family - his father a pathologist, his mother from prosperous Jewish lineage - Proust moved through aristocratic salons as a young man, collecting the social material that would fuel his art. Severe asthma disrupted his education and eventually his life. His early story collection in the 1890s went nowhere. At 38, in 1908, he began À la recherche du temps perdu: seven volumes exploring memory, love, and consciousness through a narrator's recollections, pioneering stream-of-consciousness and reshaping Modernist literature. The first sections appeared in 1913; the rest he revised while confined by illness, finishing advanced drafts before pneumonia killed him in 1922 at 51. His brother published the remaining volumes from those proofs. Proust's relationships with men were known in his circles, though he never spoke of it publicly.