PROUST: THE LATER YEARS by George D. Painter. 424 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $7.50. It was 1922. In a hermetically sealed bedroom at 44 rue Hamelin in Paris, the brilliant, untidy life of Valentin ...

In the summer of 1909, a frail, asthmatic failure retired to a cork-lined room in Paris and began writing a novel about time and memory. Over the next 15 years, Marcel Proust toiled to create the ...

William Carter’s “Proust in Love” (Yale University Press, 280 pages, $26) is what Mary Ann Caws, author of an innovative biography of Marcel Proust, says it is: the product of extensive knowledge that ...