Maxim Gorky was a Russian and Soviet writer and journalist, best known for the play The Lower Depths (1902) and the novel Mother (1906), along with his early short stories and the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood. His novel Foma Gordeyev follows a young man in late nineteenth-century Russia caught between his background and radical ideas. Active in the socialist movement, he lived in exile for much of his life before returning to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1936.
