Amazon.com description: Product Description: Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871- 1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (in English, In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber, whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of application. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann's Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913. Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. From 1890-91 Proust published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel. In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet, and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue Blanche. Amongst his other works is The Captive (1929).