ABSTRACT
Maurice Hindus was born in a small village in Russia in 1891. After the death of his improvident father, Maurice came with his mother and brothers and sisters to the United States in 1905. After successfully completing a journalistic assignment from Century Magazine to cover the story of the Tolstoyan colony of Doukhobor peasants who had settled in Canada, he made his first trip back to Russia in the early 1920's. Two of his books deal with Czechoslovakia where he reported the Sudeten crisis with Hitlerite Germany in 1938 and from which he received in grateful recognition for his services the Czechoslovak State Prize for Literature. Maurice Hindus is one of those who has taken to heart Tolstoy's warning to historians in War and Peace that, in studying society, they must make their observations focus not upon the nominal leaders of a country but upon its common people.
