A collection of short stories by the popular and influential Russian author, Maxim Gorky. He was the founder of the socialist realism literary method and arguably the greatest Russian literary figure of the 20th century. Born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, Gorky 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.