- Born
- 10 July 1871Paris, France
- Died
- 18 November 1922Paris, France · aged 51
Marcel Proust
The author of “In Search of Lost Time” loved men all his life – and wrote one of literature’s great studies of homosexuality.
Marcel Proust was the son of a renowned doctor and a mother from a wealthy Jewish family. He suffered from severe asthma from childhood. As a young man he moved in the aristocratic salons of Paris, wrote society columns and was considered a dilettante. He supported Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair.
His relationships with men were an open secret in his circles, though he never spoke of them publicly. He had a passionate relationship with the composer Reynaldo Hahn, and later loved his chauffeur and secretary Alfred Agostinelli, who died in a plane crash in 1914. In 1897 Proust fought a duel with a writer who had insinuated that he had an affair with a young man.
From 1908 he withdrew more and more, and in a cork-lined room in Paris wrote his great novel “In Search of Lost Time”, published in seven volumes from 1913 to 1927. It is a novel about memory, time, society, love and jealousy. In the volume “Sodom and Gomorrah” Proust devoted himself directly to love between men and between women, through characters such as the Baron de Charlus.
The second volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1919. Proust died of pneumonia in Paris in 1922, aged 51, while still revising the last volumes.