Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Born: December 11, 1918
Died: August 3, 2008
Nationality: Russian
Occupation: Author, novelist, soldier, teacher
Biography: Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a writer, who, through his often-suppressed writings, helped to raise global awareness of the gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system from 1918 to 1956 particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, two of his best-known works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.