Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, known as Marcel Proust, was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best remembered for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. His work is celebrated for its profound impact on the literary, philosophical, and art theory spheres. Proust's extensive narrative, lauded as a pinnacle of 20th-century art, is renowned for its introspective depth. Through recollection of the past, clear memories, and sensations, he portrayed his life in a narrative where he served as the omnipotent narrator of his autobiographical writing, crafting a dreamlike style where a scent or taste can become immensely significant, thereby creating an incredible literary sea.

Born into a well-off and cultivated family, with his father being an internationally renowned doctor and his mother a highly cultured Jewish woman, Proust's material needs were always met. He was a child marked by significant health fragility, primarily asthma, which plagued him for the rest of his life until his early death at fifty-one. As a young man, he frequented aristocratic salons, meeting various writers and artists, and gained a reputation as a snob, a perception that André Gide later used to reject his manuscript of À la recherche... almost unread. Leveraging his family's fortune, Proust lived without working and devoted himself to writing, though without success for over two decades.

In 1907, he commenced what would become the first part of his magnum opus, titled Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), published in 1913 at his own expense. The second part, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, marking his first notable recognition. Severely ill, he spent his final years exclusively finishing his masterpiece, confined to his home and seeing almost no one. Proust died in November 1922 of poorly treated bronchitis, leaving his brother to publish the remaining manuscripts, culminating in the seventh and final volume, Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained), in 1927.

Besides his main work, Proust wrote Les plaisirs et les jours, the unfinished and posthumously published novel Jean Santeuil, a collection of press articles (mainly literary criticism), and a vast number of letters—more than 100,000—whose publication was completed in 1993, spanning 21 volumes of Epistolary. He also translated John Ruskin's works with his mother's help to master English. À la recherche du temps perdu is a profound reflection on time, memory, art, passions, and human relationships, permeated by a sense of failure and the emptiness of existence, animated by over two hundred carefully composed characters.