Creatures That Once Were Men, and Other Stories

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (Russian 28 March 1868 – 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim (Maksim) Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. 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.

Gorky was active with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to Russia on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and died in June 1936.

Through Russia,

Creatures That Once Were Men,

Twenty-Six Men and a Girl,

Twenty-Six and One and Other Stories.