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…