In Search of Lost Time

In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust, his most prominent work, known for both its length and its theme of involuntary memory. Proust began to shape the novel in 1909 and continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off; the novel follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century high-society France, and though Proust established its structure early on he continued to add new material throughout, so that the last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages that existed only in draft form at his death, later edited and published posthumously by his brother Robert.