Gregorios Xenopoulos

Born Dec. 9, 1867, in Constantinople; died Jan. 14, 1951, in Athens. Greek writer. Member of the Greek Academy of Sciences (1931). Son of a merchant.

Xenopoulos was educated at the University of Athens. He is the author of the novel Margarita Stefa (1966) and of plays reflecting the social conflicts of provincial Greece. A major prose achievement is his trilogy The Rich and the Poor (1926), The Honest and the Dishonest (1926), and The Happy and the Unhappy (1927), which paints a broad canvas of Greek life at the beginning of the 20th century. Xenopoulos laid the foundations of Greek juvenile literature and critical thought. He popularized the works of L. N. Tolstoy and translated Gorky’s novella Varen’ka Olesova into Greek. He was awarded the National Prize of the Greek Academy of Sciences in 1922.