In Search of Lost Time
novel sequence by Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu), first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche (IPA: [la ʁə.ʃɛʁʃ]; lit. 'The Search'), is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early twentieth-century work is his most prominent, known for both its length and its theme of involuntary memory.
The novel gained fame in English through translations by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin and was known in the Anglosphere as Remembrance of Things Past. The title In Search of Lost Time, a literal rendering of the French, became ascendant after D. J. Enright adopted it for his revised translation published in 1992.
In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood in late 19th-century and early 20th-century high-society France. Proust began to shape the novel in 1909; he continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished, he continued to add new material and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages, as they existed only in draft form at the time of Proust's death. His brother Robert oversaw editing and publication of these parts.
The work was published in France between 1913 and 1927.
The public source identifies “In Search of Lost Time” as novel sequence by Marcel Proust. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Search, Lost and Time.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q464928. VIAF identifies the subject as 184661790. The Library of Congress control number is n00020665. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1992, 1909, 1922 and 1913.
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This entry incorporates text from “In Search of Lost Time” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.