Patrick Alexander

Patrick retired from the University of Miami in 2007 to focus on making Marcel Proust's novel accessible to a new generation of non-academic readers in the twenty-first century.

His Reader's Guide to Proust contains a detailed synopsis of all seven volumes of Proust's novel as well as in depth studies of more than fifty of the major characters. Additionally the book includes a brief overview of Proust's life and covers such background subjects as the Belle Époque and the Dreyfus Affair. More information is available at www.proustguide.com. While maintaining his reverence for Proust and encouraging a respect for the original work, Patrick has consciously used humor and modern technologies to attract new readers. To this end he created a four-minute summary of Proust on YouTube and, for morethan a year, has been re-writing all seven volumes of the novel as a series of tweets at http://www.twitter.com/prousttweet. What began as a rather tongue-in-cheek project has become an obsession and each individual tweet offers a madeleine-like evocation of Proust's prose.

The painter, David Richardson, has been working with Patrick by providing illustrations for his rewritten text and the results of their collaboration—The Illustrated Proust—can be seen at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2068180