The Russian novelist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984) won an international reputation for an epic novel, "The Silent Don," dealing with his native Don Cossack land. Sholokhov won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.

Mikhail Sholokhov was born on May 24, 1905, in a village in the Don Cossack region of Russia. His mother was a peasant, and his father came from the middle classes. Sholokhov's education was interrupted by the civil war, in which he served as a member of a Red grain-requisitioning detachment. He then went to Moscow, where he joined a group of young proletarian writers, supporting himself as a manual laborer. However, he soon returned to his native region, where he lived the rest of his life.

Sholokhov's first works were sketches and stories of the civil war, collected in 1925 as Tales of the Don. Thereafter he continued to write short stories. In 1928 the first installments of...