Author: Leo Tolstoy / Year: 1828-1910
Autobiography / Genre: Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist,
writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an
influential member of the Tolstoy family.
As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted
for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction
of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was
notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You,
which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.