More than a century ago, French novelist Marcel Proust began writing what would one day be considered the longest novel ever written, In Search of Lost Time, a sprawling multi-volume masterpiece with more than a million words. Renowned for its lushly introspective and elaborate prose, the work poses a formidable challenge to any reader. But for William Carter AB ’63, MA ’67, teaching and interpreting Proust’s novel became a lifelong passion.
Carter’s journey began far from the salons of Paris. Born in small-town Jesup, he discovered a love of language at the University of Georgia. For many, French 101 is a blur of irregular verbs. For Carter, it became a singular passion.
“I loved it immediately,” he says. “I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to major in when I came to UGA, but once I took that first class, I never looked back.”
In 1965, Carter won a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to France to study at the Université de Strasbourg. There, he immersed himself in the language. He also met his wife of almost 60 years, Lynn Goudreau, a fellow Fulbright scholar. They went back to the United States together. After completing his master’s at UGA, Carter took a job teaching at Indiana University while he completed his Ph.D. in French.
It was during his Fulbright year in France that Carter met his lifelong subject.
“I couldn’t help but be drawn to Proust,” Carter says. “When I read his writing, it’s like music. It’s just beautiful.”
Few living people know Marcel Proust (pronounced “Proost”) better than Carter. He has spent decades in conversation with this 20th century French novelist, decoding his famously layered prose and helping English-speaking audiences access it without diluting its complexity.
Great works of literature aren’t just words on a page. They’re about us, about the reader, about the human experience. [Proust’s] work is a many-layered thing that you want to read over and over again. And that’s why we keep coming back to it.”
WILLIAM CAUSEY CARTER, AUTHOR OF MARCEL PROUST: A LIFE
At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he spent the bulk of his career, Carter taught French courses on Proust. His lectures were known for bringing Proust’s revelations of late 19th century France and the World War I era to life.
“When in France, I would take slides of places Proust wrote about and use them in lectures,” he says, blending the visual and literary to capture the essence of Proust’s world.
Carter soon set out to create what renowned literary critic Harold Bloom called the definitive English-language biography of his favorite author. Marcel Proust: A Life, published by Yale University Press in 2000, became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2024, it made the New York Times Book Review’s list of best nonfiction books from 2000 to 2023. This work established Carter as one of the leading Proustian scholars in the world.
But Carter didn’t stop at the written word. In 1993, he co-produced Marcel Proust: A Writer’s Life, a PBS documentary that brought Proust’s Parisian world to the screen. And when the celebrated early 20th-century English translation of In Search of Lost Time by C.K. Scott Moncrieff entered the public domain, Yale University Press tapped Carter once more—this time to produce a revised and annotated edition of the novel.
The task was monumental: six volumes, hundreds of pages each, with every word weighed against the original French. But this labor of love was worth every sentence to Carter.
“Great works of literature aren’t just words on a page,” he says. “They’re about us, about the reader, about the human experience. His work is a many-layered thing that you want to read over and over again. And that’s why we keep coming back to it.”
Now in his 80s, Carter continues to write and lecture in English and French, maintaining his ties with the literary world. He has also served on the editorial board of the Proust Journal (Bulletin Marcel Proust) in France for nearly 50 years.
After a lifetime of writing and translating, Carter’s dedication affirms what Proust himself suggested, that “the real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
“At the very end of In Search of Lost Time,” Carter says, “the narrator uses the analogy of a pair of glasses to talk about the book he’s writing. He says that if they enable you to see and understandthe world better, fine. But if not, throw the glasses away and get another pair.”
This story appears in the Fall 2025 issue of Georgia Magazine.