Like many other literary greats, Marcel Proust spent a lot of time in solitude. It wasn’t always that way: Born into a well-off family in 1871 near Paris, France, Proust — despite suffering from chronic illnesses from a young age — was a socialite and well-connected aspiring writer for a good part of his life. His world, however, turned inward after the loss of his parents in the early 1900s. Grief-stricken, his health deteriorated, and Proust retreated almost entirely from public life.

In his Paris apartment, the walls of which were famously lined with cork to dull the city’s noise, Proust worked tirelessly, sometimes for days at a time, on what would become his opus. In Search of Lost Time, originally published in seven volumes in French as À la recherche du temps perdu from 1913 to 1927, is a transportive exploration of memory and time. Considered innovative in its time and a masterpiece today, Proust’s richly detailed exploration of the human experience endures in no small part because of its universal philosophical insights. Proust died at age 51 in 1922, and is said to have worked on changes to his famous manuscript right up until the end.