French · 1871–1922
Marcel Proust spent the last fourteen years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom writing "In Search of Lost Time," a novel in seven volumes that changed what fiction could do. The French author's sentences spiral through memory, sensation, and society; a madeleine dipped in tea unlocks an entire world. "Swann's Way" (1913) introduced his method; "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" (1919) won the Prix Goncourt. Proust died in 1922 before completing his revisions, but the work was essentially finished. Every subsequent novelist who attempts interiority writes in his shadow.