Marcel Proust, the famous French novelist and intellectual, performed some of the first studies of individual memory, incorporating observations related to the mechanisms of his own memory into his works of fiction.  Despite the fact that Proust saw memory as a largely individual process, he introduced two important concepts tied to memory that researchers continue to use as categories of analysis: (1) the notion that individual identity is essentially a compilation of memories -- a narrative, and (2) the idea of involuntary memory, recollections brought about by objects, landscapes, smells, and other such stimuli.  Proust’s best-known work, Remembrance of Things Past, inspired later social-psychological studies of memory.  The study of social memory erupted as continuation, but also as critical response, to Proust’s understanding of memory.