Happy birthday, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918), who won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) and The Gulag Archipelago (1972). Both books, and much of his other work, take to task the repressive Soviet regime of the Cold War era and its forced labor camps. Solzhenitsyn's work was banned in the Soviet Union and he was expelled in 1974. He went to Germany, then Switzerland, before settling in the United States, where he became a harsh critic of western culture as well. After the USSR was dissolved, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He died at age 89 in Moscow.