An autodidact who rose from elementary-school teacher to director of the Language and Literature Institute at the Latvian Academy of Sciences, Andrejs Upits was a literary critic, theoretician, and historian who wrote poetry, short stories, novels, and plays, and edited several journals. His collected works, published in twenty-two volumes (1946-1954), comprise more than twenty thousand pages. His writings have been translated into more than thirty languages. An avid polemicist, he became a mouthpiece for the Communist Party; thus, he earned high praise and honors under the Soviets, including the title of People's Writer, the Stalin Prize for literature, a seat on the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, membership in the Academy of Sciences, three awards named after Vladimir Lenin, and several Orders of the Red Star. According to Rolfs Ekmanis,

Right or wrong, all his essays and critical writings bear the stamp of his extraordinary...