Marcel Proust

Proust wrote A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Its first volume, Du cote de chez Swann, was published by Bernard Grasset on 14 November 1913 at the author's expense; the NRF took over the work after the First World War, and the second volume, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, won the Prix Goncourt of 1919. Sodome et Gomorrhe II appeared in 1922, and La Prisonniere (1923), Albertine disparue (1925) and Le Temps retrouve (1927) were published after his death.

Proust translated John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens (Mercure de France, 1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906), each with his own preface and notes; the preface to the second, on reading, began as a magazine essay. According to Pierre-Quint, his English was weak and he worked with dictionaries, and the Ruskin work absorbed him for about six years.

Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust's first book, was published by Calmann-Levy in 1896 with illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire and a preface by Anatole France. It collected portraits, studies and stories he had contributed to Le Banquet and La Revue blanche, together with some unpublished pieces.

In January 1914 Andre Gide wrote to Proust that the NRF's refusal of Swann would remain the review's gravest mistake and one of the most stinging regrets of his own life. Proust replied within days that, without the repeated refusals, he would not have received Gide's letter, and that its joy exceeded what publication by the NRF would have given him; he added that he had never pretended to be indifferent to the refusals.

In spring 1913 Proust wrote to Grasset that he had reworked his proofs so heavily that he would be dishonest not to pay for the extra composition, and offered a supplement; a few weeks later he apologised for the 'terrible mess' of the sheets he was returning. In June 1914 Grasset's staff told their printer that the author 'absolutely wants many more proofs'.

Reworking proofs far beyond the contract and offering to pay for it is consistent with perfectionism; the publisher's staff and a critic's complaint about surviving slips show that the result was not a clean text. Perfectionism

After Swann was declined by the NRF, the Mercure de France, Fasquelle and Ollendorff, Proust asked his friend Rene Blum in 1913 to take it to Bernard Grasset, offering to pay for the edition and publicity and to give the publisher a percentage of sales. Grasset accepted, the book came out in November 1913, and Proust went on to the second volume.

Carrying on to a fifth route to publication after four refusals is consistent with persistence; the account of the refusals comes from an admirer, and Gide's 1914 letter independently confirms the NRF's. Persistence