This French writer was born in Paris, on July
10, 1871 to a family that was well-off financially and that
moved in the refined and exclusive circles of high society.
His father was a famous doctor and his mother came from a
Jewish family of the Alsace
region. Even as a young boy, Proust was of weak health, suffering
from asthma.
Proust received an excellent education and
from a very early age gave signs of possessing great intelligence
and sensibility. Having studied Law at the Sorbonne, he later
gave up his studies to begin mingling in Paris’s fashionable
society and devote himself to writing. At the age of 35, his
ill health took a turn for the worse when he became a chronic
invalid, shutting himself up in his cork-lined room and becoming
a recluse for the rest of his life. It was during this time
that he wrote his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past
(À la recherche du temps perdu), a piece of
literature that is regarded as one of the greatest not only
in French Literature, but world literature as a whole.
The importance of
Proust’s work lies in the detailed psychological analysis
that he makes of each of his characters. He died in Paris,
in 1922.
