George Duncan Painter will always be best known as the biographer of Marcel Proust. Like so many contemporary authors who suddenly discover in their past a moment of illumination from which their lifelong inspiration springs, Painter once claimed in an interview that reading Swann's Way in C. K. Scott-Moncrieff's translation was the greatest experience of his adolescence because it revealed to him what literature was about.

Painter was born on 5 June 1914 in Birmingham, England, to George Charles Painter, a musician, singer, and teacher of English, and Minnie Rosendale Taylor Painter, an artist. In school his emphasis was Latin and Greek, and he subsequently spent a brilliant five years at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the same fields, accumulating fellowships and honors (he earned three scholarships, including the Parson and the Waddington, and was Bell Exhibitioner, Craven Student, and a classical medalist). In his interview he said: "I went right...