title: Letters of Marcel Proust
author: Marcel Proust
description: Precocious, charming, and manipulative at age 16, Proust writes in a postscript to an 1888 letter, "I don't dare reread what I have written at full speed. I know very well one shouldn't write at full speed. But I have so much to say. It surges like a tide." Prescient words from a writer whose scintillating correspondence eventually filled 21 volumes. <i>Letters of Marcel Proust,</i> a wonderfully revealing and usefully edited selected collection first published in 1948 and now revisited, brings Proust and all his familial and societal maneuverings vividly to light. As Adam Gopnik writes in his introduction, here is the true story of how a "social butterfly became a literary caterpillar."<P> <i>Donna Seaman</i><br><i>Copyright &#169; American Library Association. All rights reserved</i>
zlib_text: MARCEL PROusr 
  SELECITD LETTERS 
  1880-1903 
  EDITED BY PHILIP KOLB 
  TRANSLATED BY RALPH MANHEIM 
  INTRODUCTIONS BY ]. M. COCKING 
  Letters are the strongest indicators of per­
  sonality-perhaps the purest form of auto­
  biography. We look to them as a means of 
  knowing the author as a human being, of 
  gaining perspectives on his life and work, 
  and perhaps even of divining the secret 
  fountain of his creativity. This selection of 
  Marcel Proust's letters is interesting on all 
  counts, bringing us into the presence of the 
  man and the artist. 
  For the early years, between 1880 and 
  1895, the letters reveal young Proust's re­
  lations with his family, his self-conscious 
  flirt�1tion with the aesthetes of a decadent 
  era, his inability to choose a 'practical' 
  career, and his marked gravitation toward 
  the literary salons of the day. 
  The remaining letters evoke the years 
  1896 to 1903; the budding author pub­
  lishes Les Plasirs et les ]ours, works fit­
  fully on Jean Santeuil, then begins his 
  