Marcel Proust spent his youth climbing the social ladder of Parisian high society, collecting aristocratic friendships and absorbing every detail of a world that fascinated and repelled him. Then he retreated to a cork-lined bedroom, shut out the world entirely, and spent the last fifteen years of his life turning those social observations into In Search of Lost Time — the longest and most psychologically penetrating novel ever written.

This episode traces Proust from his asthmatic childhood through the salons that fed his fiction, the voluntary isolation that produced it, and the race against death that left the final volumes edited from his deathbed.

• Proust's privileged but sickly childhood and the social climbing that defined his young adulthood
• The cork-lined room — the voluntary imprisonment that became his creative  ...