Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Biography

Deathplace: Moscow, Russia

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an unknown high school science teacher in Russia, who became a well-known and controversial author. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962 about a prison camp inmate. Over the following 50 years, Solzhenitsyn published powerful works, including The First Circle, The Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Solzhenitsyn struggled against imprisonment and exile under Soviet Communism, but his literature was far reaching, publishing more than 30 million books in over 40 languages.