Prolific Greek writer, whose works include essays, novels, poems, tragedies, travel books, and translations of such classics as Dante's The Divine Comedy and J.W. von Goethe's Faust. Like his hero, Odysseus, Kazantzakis lived most of his artistic life outside Greece-except for the years of World War II. "I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear," Kazantzakis wrote in TODA RABA (1934). Several of the author's novels deal with the history and culture of his own country, and the mystical relationship between man and God. In 1957 he lost the Nobel Prize by a single vote to the French writer Albert Camus. "Having seen that I was not capable of using all my resources in political action, I returned to my literary activity. There lay the the battlefield suited to my temperament. I wanted to make my novels the extension of my own father's struggle for liberty. But gradually, as I kept deepening my responsibility as a writer, the human problem came to overshadow political and social questions. All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present. The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, he more the danger increases and the heart shrinks." (from Nikos Kazantzakis by Helen Kazantzakis, 1968) Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Megalokastro, Ottoman Empire, now Iráklion, Crete, as the son of Michael Kazantzakis, a farmer and dealer of in animal feed, and his wife, the former Maria Christodoulzki. Kazantzakis was raised among peasants and although Kazantzakis left Crete as a young man, he returned to his homeland constantly in his writings. He attended the Franciscan School of the Holy Cross, Naxos, and the Gymnasium at Herakleion (1899-1902). Kazantzakis then studied four years at the University of Athens, becoming Doctor of Laws in 1906.