
While some writers work hard every day and exert themselves to please their readers and editors with a new book in time, other writers devote their whole lives to writing one single book or series. These guys don’t rush, they take their time to make sure their work is exactly what they intend it to be.
Ladies and gentlemen, today you are offered a look at a list of writers who are associated with one of their books / series and learn the background of their masterpieces.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician by profession and a detective writer by vocation. The key figure of his literary career was Sherlock Holmes, a London consulting detective. Doyle wrote 4 novels and 56 short stories about this great detective whose personality has been fascinating people all over the world since the moment the first novel about him was published in 1887. Sherlock Holmes is described as a man of remarkable intelligence and observation. He can make important and serious conclusions from the smallest of observations. His astute logical reasoning and masterly use of forensic science help him to solve the most difficult cases. In 2002 the Royal Society of Chemistry bestowed an honorary fellowship of their organization upon Sherlock Holmes for his use of forensic science and analytical chemistry in popular literature. That made him the only fictional character to get this great honour.
Such an outstanding character could have been created only by a highly intelligent and intraconscious person that Doyle indeed was. Except for being a physician and a ship surgeon he was a very smart advocate. This outstanding man personally investigated two cases and saved two people from imprisonment.
Sir Conan Doyle also tried his pen in writing in other genres: historical novels, science fiction and political pamphlets. But his other works have not gotten that popular. Some of them even were not published until 2011. His name has been and will always be associated with the name of the great detective Sherlock Holmes as if they were not two different men, but one.

Gone with the Wind is a great historical romance novel depicting the Civil War era. It was published in June in 1936 and the following May the author was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
And the first thing that astonishes you about the book is that it was written by a housewife during the time when marriage was the goal of all young ladies, and all social and educational pursuits were directed towards it. And we’d like to explode your thoughts that she might have been a silly romantic lady who was longing for a great and passionate love and transferred her deepest desires into the novel.
As a daughter of a suffragist Margaret Mitchell was a free-spirited lady who liked doing two things – confusing society and writing. Her literary talent had been signaling her since her childhood. And she tried to follow that inner voice writing some short stories and articles for newspapers. But quite often that voice was interrupted by other people’s criticism or even her own doubts. There was even a period when she honestly tried to suppress her writing nature and become a full-time wife. But she read so much that finally her husband couldn’t put up with the piles of books at home and told her: “For God's sake can't you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?” Those words were the push she needed at that time.
Gone with the Wind is the author’s nostalgia for the vanished age which was gone with the wind of the Civil War. Two main themes running through the whole novel are human survival and the persistence of romantic dreams.
When Margaret was growing up she heard a lot of stories about the war from her relatives and veterans which impressed the young girl. That helped her to create a precise setting for her novel. She made such a detailed historical narration that even today some scholars use her novel in their studies.
Margaret Mitchell is a bright example that a gifted person doesn’t need higher education or someone’s approval to create a masterpiece.

Nelle Harper Lee is an American novelist known throughout the world for her great novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The author was awarded the Pulitzer Prize a year after the book’s publication (1960). And despite the fact that she is a One Book Writer, she has also been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature.
The most important themes covered in the novel are social injustice and the importance of moral education for children. To Kill a Mockingbird portrays the influence of racism and racial prejudices on people’s minds. As for the title, it keeps you puzzled until you finish reading and learn the idea it hides together with the youngest characters of the story.
Some critics believe that Harper Lee managed to write such an outstanding novel due to her principle that an author should write about what he knows and write truthfully. Harper Lee definitely knew what she was writing about because when she was a child she witnessed the story she assumed as the basis for her novel. Her father was a lawyer who defended a black man accused of raping a white woman. So, she turned her childhood memories into a novel. Lee combined the narrator's voice of a child observing her surroundings with a grown woman's reflecting on her childhood. That narrative method helped her to show how hypocritical and biased the society was and how their blind prejudices ruined people’s lives.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is the author of one of the most sensational books of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago. He devoted half of his life to its writing and publishing which took him a lot of time and strength, as there were some people who didn’t like even the idea of the book’s existence. GULag or Gulág is an acronym for the Russian term meaning the General Department of the Correctional Labour Camps.
The book tells about the Soviet forced labour camp system during the period of Stalin repressions. It’s based on the author’s personal experience and letters and memories of 257 prisoners. Solzhenitsyn and some people who helped him to collect the information sacrificed a lot to get the work published. The Soviet authorities did everything possible to prevent the publication: threatened, bribed and imprisoned anyone connected with that work. That is why Solzhenitsyn was writing it from 1958 to 1968 and got it published only in 1973 in France. The people of the Soviet Union could see it only in 1990. And its final and complete edition with all the remarks and corrections was published in 2005. The book has also been included into the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading since 2009.