From his earliest youth until his death in 1922, Marcel Proust was a meticulous and prolific correspondent: he wrote to relatives, family, friends, defenders of his work, and even his greatest detractors. In the thousands of letters he sent, in which the register and style are masterfully adapted to the recipient, he covers a wide variety of topics: intimate memories and confessions, impressions of his readings, negotiations with his publishers, and commentaries on current political events, which subtly outline many of the episodes and motifs that would inform his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. This selection brings together nearly two hundred letters written by Proust from his adolescence until his final days, offering a vivid portrait of the writer, his world, and his times. The reader has in his hands a fascinating reading guide to a masterpiece of European literature in which the writer, in the words of an admired Beckett, "discovers himself as an artist in creative and destructive Time," as a privileged witness to the twilight of an era and a brilliant precursor to a new one.