Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871. He studied law at the Sorbonne but was drawn to writing, and published his first work in 1896. After the death of his parents in the early 1900s he gradually withdrew from society, eventually spending the majority of his time in his cork-lined bedroom. In Search of Lost Time is his major work, developed during the last decade of his life. He died in 1922.

Biography

Born to a wealthy family, iconic French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922) studied law and literature. His social connections allowed him to become an observant habitué of the most exclusive drawing rooms of the nobility, and he wrote social pieces for Parisian journals. He published essays and stories, including the story collection Pleasures and Days (1896). He had suffered from asthma since childhood, and c. 1897 he began to disengage from social life as his health declined.

Half-Jewish himself, he became a major supporter of Alfred Dreyfus in the affair that made French anti-Semitism into a national issue. Deeply affected by his mother's death in 1905, he withdrew further from society. An incident of involuntary revival of childhood memory in 1909 led him to retire almost totally into an eccentric seclusion in his cork-lined bedroom to write À la recherche du temps perdu (in English: In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past ). Published between 1913 and 1927, the vast seven-part novel is at once a kind of autobiography, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense meditation on love and jealousy and on art and its relation to reality. One of the supreme achievements in fiction of all time, it brought him worldwide fame and affected the entire climate of the 20th-century novel.

Mark Treharne's acclaimed new translation of The Guermantes Way will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. The third volume in this superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time -- the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s -- it brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy.

After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.