Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868–1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (Russian: Максим Горький), was a Russian writer and political activist. 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 a short story collection 'Sketches and Stories' (1899), plays 'The Philistines' (1901), 'The Lower Depths' (1902) and 'Children of the Sun' (1905), poem 'The Song of the Stormy Petrel' (1901), autobiographical trilogy 'My Childhood', 'In the World', 'My Universities' (1913–1923), and novel 'Mother' (1906). Though Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, most are now seen as masterpieces.
