Who wrote the twelve-volume novel cycle In Search of Lost Time?

Proust, and it is about 1.25 million words - among the longest novels ever written, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, the last three posthumously. He paid to publish the first volume himself after several rejections, one of them from André Gide, who later called it the greatest mistake of his life.

The madeleine is the most famous moment and is usually misremembered. The narrator tastes tea and cake and is overwhelmed by an involuntary memory - the point being that deliberate recall gives you facts while an accidental sensory trigger returns the past whole, with the feeling intact. That distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory is the intellectual engine of the whole cycle, and it turns out to be roughly right: smell and taste route almost directly into the brain's memory and emotion centres.

He wrote most of it in a cork-lined bedroom, largely nocturnal, severely asthmatic, revising obsessively on galley proofs until printers despaired. He died at 51 of pneumonia, still correcting. The last volume's title translates as Time Regained, and the cycle's argument is that a life is recovered by writing it - which is what he was doing while running out of it.