Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, also known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer and socialist proponent. He received five nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before becoming a successful author, he traveled extensively around the Russian Empire, changing employment on a regular basis, experiences that influenced his writing. Gorky's most well-known works include his early short stories ("Chelkash," "Old Izergil," and "Twenty-six Men and a Girl"); plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902), and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, "The Song of the Stormy Petrel" (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913-1923); and a novel, Mother (1906). Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on March 28, 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod. He became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was raised by his maternal grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. Following a suicide attempt in December 1887, he walked around the Russian Empire for five years, changing occupations and gathering impressions that he would later employ in his writing. As a journalist for provincial newspapers, he used the alias Jehudiel Khlamida.He began using the pseudonym "Gorky" in 1892, when his first short story, "Makar Chudra," was published by the newspaper Kavkaz (The Caucasus) in Tiflis, where he spent several weeks doing menial labor, primarily for the Caucasian Railway workshops.
