Marcel Proust helped pioneer stream-of-consciousness writing

Person: Marcel Proust
Lived: 1871–1922
Field: Literature
From: French

The story

Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871 and spent his early career as a writer of essays, stories and translations, often dismissed as a society dilettante. In 1908 he listed projects in progress, including a Parisian novel and essays on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, and later that year began a novel about a sleepless narrator remembering how he waited for his mother as a child. By 1909, when he was 38, this had become In Search of Lost Time.

It grew into seven volumes, published between 1913 and 1927: Swann's Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Prisoner, The Fugitive and Time Regained. The last three appeared after his death in 1922, edited by his brother Robert. At about 1.27 million words, the novel holds the Guinness World Record as the longest novel.

The novel follows a first-person narrator, never definitively named, through his memories, loves and entry into Parisian high society. It helped pioneer the stream-of-consciousness technique, following the movement of the mind from moment to moment. Its length, complexity and meditations on desire, artistic creativity, sexuality and class made it a significant work in the development of literary modernism.

It also offers a social history of France, charting the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes during the fin de siècle. Great aristocratic families lose their standing, the elegant Charles Swann is shunned for supporting Dreyfus, and the final volume carries the story through the First World War.

Proust is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf, reading him in 1922, wished she could write like that, and the critic Harold Bloom called the work widely recognised as the major novel of the twentieth century. Translated into English from 1922 and retranslated several times since, it has been adapted for film, television, stage, radio and graphic novels, and it helped change how fiction could represent the inner life.