Marcel Proust (Author) Proust was born in Auteuil, France in 1871. He began writing his masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu , in 1909, and worked on it until his death in 1922, following several years of poor health during which he had been confined to his bedroom. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator) Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff was born in Scotland in 1889 and served on the Western Front in the First World War, where he was seriously injured at the Battle of Arras. In 1922, he started work on his famous translation of Proust's novel, taking his English title from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30. He was still translating the novel at the time of his death in Rome in 1930.