One of the giants of literary modernism, Marcel Proust, was born 10 July 1871. In the final decade and a half of his life, Proust wrote the monumental seven-part novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), which is famous not only for being one of the world’s longest novels—some 1,267,069 words total—but for Proust’s extraordinary descriptive powers and lengthy, winding—“Proustian”—sentences. Here’s an example of a Proustian sentence from the beginning of Swann’s Way:

I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.

(Though in terms of writing The World’s Longest SentenceTM, Proust is somewhat of a slacker it turns out, with modern experimental novelists like Matthias Enard or Laszlo Krasznahorkai–or, ahem, yours truly reviewing Laszlo Krasznahorkai–penning sentences that are longer than anything in Proust by thousands or even tens of thousands of words; then again, when it comes to the beauty of the Proustian sentence, size isn’t everything. :D)

Born into France’s aristocracy, Proust as a young man lived a life with no firm direction. He served a year in the military, published reviews and essays, made one abortive attempt at writing a novel, spent a lot of time kabitzing in the homes of the rich and the glamorous, all of which are experiences he would eventually recount (not uncritically) in his novel. He is thought to have been a closet homosexual, but he had a reputation in his youth as exactly the sort of rich snob he would later depict harshly in his novel. He also began to do important translations of English art critic John Ruskin into French.

Still, Proust passed into middle age without any great accomplishments.

But that’s not the whole story, because throughout his life Proust was battling with a mysterious illness. He received leave from the military on account of suffering from asthma and towards the end of his life grew sicker and sicker. Doctors of the time claimed that Proust was exaggerating his sickness and laid it down to hyperchondria, but this recent article examining Proust’s self reported symptoms in his letters hypothesizes that he suffered from a debilitating cardiovascular variation of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome: (https://tinyurl.com/y9rtg38n). He would ultimately spend the last three years of his life confined to his bedroom before dying of pneumonia in 1922.

The idea for In Search of Lost Time came together for Proust in 1909.The novel was published in seven parts which Proust continued to write for the remainder of his life. Initial reaction to the book was puzzlement, as it seemed an impossibly long ocean of random memories which did not telegraph exactly where Proust was going with all this. When Proust sent the first part, Swann’s Way to the publisher NRF, it was rejected, a decision the novelist Andre Gide (who had been asked to review the novel for the publisher) later told Proust in a letter “will remain the most serious mistake ever made by NRF and, since I bear the shame of being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life.” The publisher tried to convince Proust to publish the remainder of the book with them after the author went with another publisher, but were unsuccessful. As the remaining volumes of the book emerged, In Search of Lost Time developed into not merely a sea of disorganized memories, but instead one of the most astonishingly organized and grandly conceived works of art of all time.