Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871 ? 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (translated as Remembrance of Things Past), published between 1913 and 1927. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date".;