Leo Tolstoy

Born at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow. Old Russian nobility. His mother dies when he's 2. His father dies when he's 9. Raised by relatives. Enrolls at Kazan University, drops out. Gambles heavily. Runs up debts. Joins the army and fights in the Crimean War. He is 26 and hasn't written anything yet.

Finishes War and Peace after six years of writing. It's 1,225 pages with over 500 characters. He researches the Napoleonic Wars obsessively, visits the battlefield of Borodino, reads dispatches and memoirs. His wife Sophia copies the manuscript out by hand seven times. He calls it "not a novel."

Publishes Anna Karenina in serial form. He begins it after witnessing a woman throw herself under a freight train near his estate. The first line: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Virginia Woolf calls him "the greatest of all novelists."

Suffers a devastating spiritual crisis. Rich, famous, healthy. Considers hanging himself. He writes Confession, describing how the question "Why do I live?" nearly destroys him. He rejects the Orthodox Church, reads the Gospels literally, embraces Christian anarchism and nonviolence. He renounces his property. His wife refuses to go along.

Publishes The Kingdom of God Is Within You. A book arguing that all government force is immoral and that the Sermon on the Mount requires absolute pacifism. Gandhi reads it in South Africa and calls it overwhelming. It shapes his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. traces his intellectual lineage through Gandhi to Tolstoy.

Runs away from home at 82. He's been fighting with Sophia for years over his property and his radical beliefs. He catches pneumonia on the train and dies at the railway station at Astapovo. His last words to his daughter: "I love truth very much." Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Never won. It's still considered one of the great Nobel controversies.