This Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust's 3,000-page magnum opus, A la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time], is intended not only for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the humanities, but also for the intellectually curious reader who has heard of Proust's remarkable literary achievement but has not had the time, the courage, or the discipline to undertake a reading project of rather considerable scope. My purpose has been to analyze and to clarify Proust's text without having recourse to specialized vocabulary and without engaging at great length in dialogue with those critics who, from the early twentieth century until the present moment, have enriched our understanding of a beautiful but complex work. From Ernst Robert Curtius, Walter Benjamin, and Samuel Beckett to Antoine Compagnon, Julia Kristeva, and Malcolm Bowie, passing through stages of progressive insight brought to us by readers such as Germaine Brée, Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Gérard Genette, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Jean-Yves Tadié, and many others, Proust's text has been a testing ground for critical and theoretical meditation, an unavoidable point of reference for any serious reflection on literary modernity. It is incumbent upon the contemporary critic doing conceptually or philologically rigorous work on Proust to place his or her own thoughts within the large perspective opened up by these distinguished readers and the questions they have posed.