My first Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn novel was A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I soon assembled a collection of his books, though I can't claim to have read them all. The Gulag Archipelago was life altering for this kid from rural Wisconsin, even though by the time I read it, Solzhenitsyn was saying nasty things about my country from the safety of Vermont. As noted in the NYT, "Many in the West didn’t know what to make of the man," but it's hard to think of a writer with a more profound influence on the world than Solzhenitsyn.

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