The first of the novel cycle, Du côté de chez Swann (1913, tr. Swann's Way, 1928) went unnoticed, but the second, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919, tr. Within a Budding Grove, 1919), was awarded the Goncourt Prize. Proust's semiautobiographical novel cycle is superficially concerned with its hero's development through childhood and through youthful love affairs to the point of commitment to literary endeavor. It is less a story than an interior monologue. Discursive, but alive with brilliant metaphor and sense imagery, the work is rich in psychological, philosophical, and sociological understanding. A vital theme is the link between external and internal reality found in time and memory, to which Proust sees humanity's strivings subjugated—time mocks the individual's intelligence and endeavors; memory synthesizes yet distorts past experience. Most experience causes inner pain, and the objects of human desires are the chief causes of their suffering.

In Proust's scheme the individual is isolated, society is false and ruled by snobbery, and artistic endeavor is raised to a religion and is superior to nature. Only through the vision gained in works of art can the individual see beyond his or her subjective experience. Proust's ability to interpret innermost experience in terms of such eternal forces as time and death created a profound and protean world view and his work has influenced generations of novelists and thinkers. His vision and technique have come to be seen as vital to the development of modernism. Most of his correspondence has been published (21 vol., P. Kolb, ed., 1970-93), as has his draft of an early novel, Jean Santeuil (1952, tr. 1955), and Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954, tr. On Art and Literature, 1896-1919, 1958).

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(born Jan. 7, 1899, Paris, Fr.—died Jan. 30, 1963, Paris) French composer. In his teens he studied piano with Ricardo Viñes (1875–1943). Influenced by Erik Satie, Poulenc and five other like-minded young composers became known as Les Six. Poulenc wrote piano compositions, orchestral music, and chamber music, but he is best known for his vocal music, including many admired songs, the operas The Breasts of Tiresias (1944), Dialogues of the Carmelites (1956), and La voix humaine (1958), and such sacred choral works as Mass in G Major (1937), the Stabat Mater (1950), and the Gloria (1959), reflecting his devout Catholicism.

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(born May 10, 1872, Épinal, Fr.—died Feb. 10, 1950, Paris) French sociologist and anthropologist. Mauss was the nephew of Émile Durkheim, who contributed much to his intellectual formation and with whom he collaborated in such important works as Suicide (1897) and Primitive Classification (1901–02). His most influential independent work was The Gift (1925), a highly original comparative study of the relation between forms of gift exchange and social structure. He taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and Collège de France and cofounded the University of Paris's Institut d'Ethnologie. His views on ethnological theory and method influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronisław Malinowski, and Edward Evans-Pritchard.

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(born March 22, 1923, Strasbourg, France—died Sept. 22, 2007, Cahors) French mime. After serving in World War II, he studied with the pantomimist Étienne Decroux and had his first success in the role of Arlequin in Baptiste. He formed a mime troupe (1949–64) and earned worldwide acclaim in the 1950s with his production of the “mimodrama” of Nikolay Gogol's Overcoat. In 1978 he founded a school of mimodrama in Paris. He was noted for his eloquent, deceptively simple portrayals, including his celebrated white-faced character Bip, reminiscent of Pierrot and of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. Marceau, who also acted in several movies, retired from performing in 2005. Seealso mime and pantomime.

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(born July 28, 1887, Blainville, France—died Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly) French artist and art innovator. In 1913 he caused a sensation at the Armory Show with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which combined the principles of Cubism and Futurism. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards then led him to devise his famous ready-mades: in 1913 he exhibited Bicycle Wheel, which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel displayed as a work of art, and in 1917 he exhibited a urinal he enh1d Fountain. Intended as a derisive gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art, the ready-mades ushered in an era when contemporary art became in itself a mixture of creation and criticism. In Paris in 1919 he established contact with the Dada group of artists, whose nihilistic ideas he had anticipated. During this period he exhibited a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee added, a gesture that expressed the Dadaists' scorn for the art of the past. He greatly influenced the Surrealists, and his attitude toward art and society led to Pop art and other modern and postmodern movements. A legend in his lifetime, he is considered one of the leading spirits of 20th-century art.

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