The Letters of Marcel Proust

Mina Curtiss Mina Curtiss (translator)

This wonderful collection of Marcel Proust’s letters, selected and translated by Mina Curtiss, is both a revelatory introduction to the great writer and a treasure trove for those readers more familiar with his À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Mina Curtiss especially chose these letters as apt illustrations of Proust’s growing sensibility and intellectual power during the gestation of the novel. Indeed, many of the characters in the book are drawn from the men and women we meet here. The letters are also exciting as an unfolding panorama of the Belle Époque and for their superb insights into literature, art, and music.

• “They do paint a picture of a young man on the make, in one of the most enviable times ever to be alive; and, with the Dreyfus case stirring and the Great War approaching, they also paint a picture of how that time darkened. More movingly than perhaps any other body of literary letters, though, they show a great novelist coming into his maturity.” —Adam Gopnik