Mario Puzo

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil's whole life was marked by an exceptional compassion for the suffering of others; at the age of five, she refused to eat sugar after she heard that soldiers fighting WWI had to go without. She died from malnutrition... during WWII after refusing to eat more than the minimal rations she believed were available to soldiers at the time. After completing her education Weil became a professor. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s - she took several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism. Weil was politically active from early childhood: her activism included helping unions to organise and work together collaboratively, involvement with Marxists and Anarchists, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer so she could better understand the working class. She sometimes gave away almost her entire income and lived in the most frugal of circumstances, though she did occasionally allow herself foreign holidays.
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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky ; 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881 sometimes translated as Dostoevsky, was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century... Russian society. A Slavophile, nationalist and monarchist, he criticised the bourgeois, pre-materialist West and nihilism in many of his works. Although Dostoyevsky wrote books in the mid-1850s which were influenced by realist and romanticist writers, most notably by Dickens, Gogol and Balzac, his best remembered work was done in his last years, including such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky overall wrote 11 complete novels, 3 novellas, 17 short novels and 3 essays. He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born and raised within the grounds of the Mariinsky hospital.
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