Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist and critic whose seven-part In Search of Lost Time is among the central works of twentieth-century fiction. Chronically asthmatic and increasingly reclusive, he spent his last years in a cork-lined room in Paris, revising and expanding the novel until his death. Its opening volume, Swann's Way, was published at his own expense in 1913 after several rejections.