In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume.
A first galley proof of À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann with Proust's handwritten corrections
NRF edition of Du côté de chez Swann, 1917
1923 edition of La Prisonnière. It is labelled as "Tome VI" as Sodom et Gomorrhe was originally published in two volumes.
Illiers, the country town overlooked by a church steeple where Proust spent time as a child and which he described as "Combray" in the novel. The town adopted the name Illiers-Combray in homage.
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
Proust in 1900 (photograph by Otto Wegener)
Marcel Proust (seated), Robert de Flers (left), and Lucien Daudet (right), c. 1894
Jean Béraud, La Sortie du lycée Condorcet
102 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris, where Marcel Proust lived from 1907 to 1919
