In 1936 Léon Pierre-Quint claimed that the vogue for A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) was ended and that Marcel Proust was destined henceforth to interest only thesis writers at the Sorbonne. He was still the authority on Proust, having published the first biography in 1925, but he could not have been more mistaken, for Proust today is almost universally revered as the greatest French author of the twentieth century. His masterpiece comes closer than that of any other French writer of this century to being a summa, a literary monument. It continues the traditions both of the great seventeenth-century classical writers such as Madame de La Fayette, the Duc de Saint-Simon, and La Rochefoucauld, and of the nineteenth-century realists--Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert. Yet it is also highly innovative in technique and content. By his style alone Proust stands among the masters. His great...