“... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.”

French novelist, literary critic, and essayist

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is best known for À la recherche du temps perdu, the seven-volume novel published between 1913 and 1927. That work runs to around 1.25 million words and secured his place among the most influential writers of the twentieth century, according to critics and fellow authors. His reputation rests above all on this long, closely observed novel and on his wider influence on modern literature.