William C. Carter
Marcel Proust: A Life
Yale University Press, 2000. Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity. First printing. 0300081456  xiv/946 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately , is bound in gilt-lettered black cloth and off-white paper-covered boards. Book shows light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright. Dust jacket is in fine condition. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"This is the first comprehensive biography of Marcel Proust since George Painter's biography was published in 1959. Like Proust's masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, the biography is structured as the story of the writer's slow and at times excruciatingly painful search for a vocation. Proust emerges from Carter's narrative as an extremely complicated, difficult and brilliant man. Carter goes into some detail to elucidate Proust's curious sexual identity - from his intense and often histrionic relationships with his male friends to his quasi-pathological attachment to his mother to the bizarre sexual fetishes that emerged in his visits to Parisian brothels. But the biography focuses firmly on Proust's development as an artist - the distracted years as a dilettantish member of Parisian high-society, the dabbling in journalism and translation and, finally, his emergence as one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. This is a full, rich, deep, and all encompassing biography of one of the great writers in the world. It is also an elucidating cultural history of the times in which he lived."