So it seems safe to assume that Proust would have continued to work on the last three books had he lived longer. “After a time he would have a clean copy typed, but this by no means marked the end of the rewriting process, which might continue to the proof stage and beyond.” “Proust composed by an immensely complex process of writing and rewriting, weaving together passages sometimes composed years apart, filling his margins with additions and, when the margins ran out, continuing on strips of paper glued to the pages,” scholar Carol Clark wrote in a 2019 piece for Literary Hub. Though he had technically finished writing the manuscripts, he was far from the final sign-off the last installment, Finding Time Again, hadn’t even been typed yet. Proust wasn’t wrong: He died from pneumonia in November 1922 at age 51, before the last three volumes had been released. “I have put the best of myself into it,” he wrote in one letter, “and what it needs now is that a monumental tomb should be completed for its reception before my own is filled.”

But asthma-related illnesses often interrupted him, and by the time he was looking for a publisher for In Search of Lost Time, he sensed he was nearing his end. Proust was born into wealth, which allowed him the freedom to focus on writing and partake in the salon-based intellectual society of the era. The last three books were released posthumously. When the work drew acclaim, writer André Gide, who had encouraged La Nouvelle Revue Française’s original rejection, told Proust it was “the worst blunder they ever made.” Fortunately, the journal redeemed itself by publishing the following volumes. In the end, Proust resigned himself to footing the bill, enlisting the help of an as-yet-unestablished publisher named Bernard Grasset to print the books. The literary journal La Nouvelle Revue Française passed in part because they considered Proust’s writing too aristocratic and Marc Humblot, another prospective publisher, found it prohibitively verbose, explaining that he “just can’t understand why anyone should take thirty pages to describe how he tosses about in bed because he can’t get to sleep.”

Proust first sent them to a well-known publisher named Fasquelle, who suggested so many edits that the author decided to look elsewhere. But getting someone to back the several hundred meandering pages that made up the first volume of Lost Time proved difficult. Proust had published essays and short stories in magazines and newspapers before, and some of those short stories were even released in a book called Pleasures and Days in 1896. Within a Budding Grove In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Marcel proust books in order