In writing The Proust Screenplay, Pinter adapted the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's magnum opus À la recherche du temps perdu for a film commissioned by the late director Joseph Losey to be directed by Losey (Billington, Harold Pinter 224-330).
The Proust Screenplay, in Billington's view "a masterpiece .. [which] captures Proust's merciless social comedy" (Harold Pinter 230), was eventually published by Grove Press in both hardback and paperback in 1977 and by Faber and Faber in hardback in 1978 (Baker and Ross 115-18).