Marcel Proust

Spent the last fourteen years of his life largely confined to a cork-lined Paris bedroom writing À la recherche du temps perdu, a seven-volume, 1.25-million-word novel built around the famous scene of a narrator's memory unlocked by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. Raised Catholic by his father but the son of a prosperous Jewish mother, Proust drew on the antisemitism surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, which he witnessed firsthand in Belle Époque Paris, as material for the novel's social world. He died in 1922 before finishing its editing, and it is now read as one of the twentieth century's foundational works of fiction.