Marcel Proust

Asthmatic and increasingly nocturnal, Proust spent his last years in a cork-lined bedroom writing a novel of about 1.25 million words. The first volume was refused by every publisher he tried, including one who wrote that he could not understand why a man needed thirty pages to describe turning over in bed.

He was still correcting the later volumes when he died of pneumonia at fifty-one. Three of the seven were published posthumously. He lies in the family vault at Père-Lachaise, under plain black marble.