In 2022, France is marking the centenary of the death of the novelist Marcel Proust, the author of the 20th century masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past. In this archive edition of Witness History, ...

Matthew Sweet gathers together four Proust fans from very different backgrounds - the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jane Smiley, the psychotherapist, Jane Haynes, Christopher Prendergast, who has a ...

Marcel Proust’s madeleine is the cliché cookie—a highbrow reference that’s penetrated pop culture. (Take the Sopranos episode in which Tony’s Proustian madeleine is a slice of cappicola.) The great ...

This year has been punctuated by a rash of anniversary-themed books and articles anticipating the first world war centenary, and indeed attempting snapshots of how Europe looked and felt in 1913, ...

At age 21, Marcel Proust is extremely pale, with large, lugubrious brown eyes and a wispy moustache over a sensuous mouth. It is 1892 and in Jacques-Émile Blanche's portrait of the dandy, socialite ...

One hundred years ago, French publishers were busy rejecting a wordy, novelistic treatise on childhood, memory and society by a Parisian dandy and dilettante named Marcel Proust. In November, 1913, ...

Marcel Proust wrote “the idea of popular art…if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous.” Locked far away from society in his cork-lined room (why cork? Why not? It blocked out useless sound ...

French writer Marcel Proust is often considered one of Europe’s greatest modern authors. He dedicated his life to writing “In Search of Lost Time” – a 3,000-word opus in seven volumes which many ...

Proust, a reviewer wrote in 1921, “may not be what his hero set out to be in his childhood, the greatest writer in the world, but he is one of those.” The Nation has always been enthusiastic about ...

Author of the monumental multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time. High modernist of the first order and reclusive titan of French letters. And, if one Canadian scholar is correct, quite the dapper ...

In 1886, Antoinette Faure, the daughter of the future French President Félix Faure, asked her childhood friend Marcel Proust to fill out a questionnaire in a book titled “Confessions. An Album to ...