Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( PROOST; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (translated in English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), 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 twentieth century.
Proust was born in the Auteuil quarter of Paris, to a wealthy bourgeois family. His father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist who studied cholera. His mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was from a prosperous Jewish family. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith, though he later became an atheist. From a young age, he struggled with severe asthma attacks which caused him to have a disrupted education. As a young man, Proust cultivated interests in literature and writing while moving in elite Parisian high society salons frequented by aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie. These social connections provided inspiration and material for his later novel. His first works, including the collection of stories Les plaisirs et les jours, were published in the 1890s to little public success.
In 1908, Proust began work on À la recherche du temps perdu. The novel consists of seven volumes totaling around 1.25 million words.