A collection of short stories by the popular and influential Russian author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and arguably the greatest Russian literary figure of the 20th century. Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian writer and political activist. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s; 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); and post-revolutionary works such as the novels The Artamonov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (1925-1936), the latter is considered Gorky's masterpiece and has sometimes been viewed by critics as a modernist work. He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.
