Marcel Proust

Proust suffered from asthma so severe that he built his adult life around avoiding it: lining his bedroom on the boulevard Haussmann with cork against noise and dust, sleeping by day, and receiving Paris's most fashionable salons only by letter. He spent his twenties and thirties as a society dilettante before starting, around 1908, the novel that would consume the rest of his life.

Swann's Way was rejected by several publishers, including André Gide at the Nouvelle Revue Française, who later called the refusal the greatest regret of his editorial career; Proust paid to print it himself in 1913. He kept revising and extending the cycle through the First World War, won the Prix Goncourt for its third volume in 1919, and died in 1922 of pneumonia, still correcting proofs of installments published after his death.