Russian · 1828–1910
Leo Tolstoy wrote two of the longest novels anyone actually reads—and reads again. "War and Peace" follows five aristocratic families through Napoleon's invasion of Russia; "Anna Karenina" traces a married woman's affair and destruction against the backdrop of changing Russian society. The Count's later religious conversion led him to reject his own fiction as vanity, but readers have not followed his lead. Tolstoy's influence extends beyond literature to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who drew on his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. He died in 1910 at a railway station, having fled his estate in a final spiritual crisis.