Leo Tolstoy

Born to Russian aristocracy in 1828, Tolstoy made his name in his twenties with a semi-autobiographical trilogy and sketches drawn from the Crimean War. War and Peace arrived in 1869, Anna Karenina in 1878 - both now considered pinnacles of realist fiction. Then, in the 1870s, came a moral crisis and what he called a spiritual awakening: he turned to a literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount, became a pacifist, and poured his new convictions into works like The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which reached figures like Gandhi and King. He kept writing - novellas like The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a late novel called Resurrection built on his "youthful sins" and his embrace of Henry George's economic philosophy - but the man who'd been nominated for the Nobel in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 never won, a controversy that hasn't faded. He died in 1910, leaving an oeuvre Virginia Woolf said belonged to "the greatest of all novelists."