Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightwe…
"Man Ray's celebrated photo of Marcel Proust on his deathbed shows a youngish-seeming man with ringed eyes and bedclothes pulled up to his chin. Jean Cocteau had sumoned Ray to 44, rue Hamelin to take the final picture. Left alone briefly with the body that afternoon, Cocteau no…
"Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightw…
An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century "Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired P…