Author: Marcel Proust

In Search of Lost Time runs to something like a million and a quarter words across seven volumes, and Proust spent his last years in a cork-lined bedroom, asthmatic and nocturnal, expanding proofs until the printers despaired. The first volume was turned down by several houses, including by André Gide at Gallimard, who afterwards called it the gravest mistake of his life, and Proust paid to have it printed. He was half Jewish and homosexual, and the novel states neither directly while running on both. The Captive and The Fugitive are volumes five and six, assembled from his manuscripts after he died in 1922, so the text of the final third is an editorial reconstruction rather than a settled thing.