Abolqasem Ferdowsi

Ferdowsi was born to a family of modest landowning gentry near Tus in northeastern Iran, educated enough in Persian and Arabic literary tradition to inherit an unfinished project: an earlier poet's attempt to versify Iran's pre-Islamic history and legend before it faded from memory under centuries of Arab linguistic dominance.

He spent some thirty years completing the Shahnameh, 'The Book of Kings,' roughly fifty thousand couplets tracing Persia's kings and heroes from creation myth through the seventh-century Arab conquest, deliberately avoiding Arabic loanwords to keep the poem's Persian as pure as he could make it. He presented the finished epic to the Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud, who by most accounts paid him far less than promised, and legend holds Ferdowsi mocked the sultan in verse and fled into hiding for years afterward.

He died in Tus in poverty around 1020, but the Shahnameh outlived every slight done to him, becoming the central text of Persian national identity and the single most important reason New Persian survived as a literary language after the Arab conquest.