The captive

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was born in Paris to a wealthy family, suffered from asthma from childhood and spent his youth in the fashionable salons of Paris society, which he later described with ironic precision. He supported Dreyfus, wrote essays and translated John Ruskin.

After his parents' deaths he withdrew to a cork-lined bedroom and worked through the nights on In Search of Lost Time. Publishers rejected the first volume, Swann's Way, and he paid to publish it in 1913; the second volume won the Goncourt Prize in 1919. He died before the last volumes were published.