For many, Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is the supreme European writer of the twentieth century. His seven-volume masterpiece, Àla recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), is astonishing in the range of its themes and ideas. It is a philosophical novel about time, memory, imagination, and art; a psychological novel about sexuality, love, and jealousy; a sociological novel about how the social world is organised into groups and how our identities are formed by those groups; a political novel containing acute analyses of class perceptions, social mobility, racism, homophobia, and war; and a comic novel of manners, character, and language. In Search of Lost Time (as it is now commonly translated) is also a boldly experimental novel, quite unlike what contemporary readers understood to be a work of fiction. Proust is a key figure in the development of modernism: he redefined the boundaries of fiction, breaking open the French heritage of realism by shifting the focus of the novel from ‘the real’ to the creative mind of the novelist.