Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексей Максимович Пешков or Пешков), primarily known as Maxim Gorky (Максим Горький), was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist.
He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl, The Song of the Stormy Petrel, The Mother, Summerfolk and Children of the Sun. He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later write his memoirs on both of them.
