Anton Chekhov

Chekhov's father went bankrupt and fled to Moscow to escape debtors' prison, leaving teenage Anton to sell the family's possessions and finish school alone in Taganrog. He paid his way through medical school writing comic sketches for magazines under joke pen names, then practiced medicine, often for free among the rural poor, while his stories quietly outgrew the market that had first paid for them.

In 1890 he made an arduous journey across Siberia to the Sakhalin penal colony to document the conditions of exiled convicts, a reporting trip that hardened his sense of plain, unsentimental observation. Tuberculosis, which he diagnosed in himself years before admitting it, finally killed him in a German spa town in 1904, not long after his late marriage to the actress Olga Knipper.