Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer and proponent of socialism. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories "Chelkash", "Old Izergil", and "Twenty-six Men and a Girl"; plays The Philistines, The Lower Depths and Children of the Sun; a poem, "The Song of the Stormy Petrel"; his fictional autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities; and a novel, Mother. Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized; Gorky thought of Mother as one of his biggest failures.