Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), the best known of modern Greek writers, was born in Crete and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He studied at the University of Athens, where he received his Doctor of Laws degree, and later studied in Paris under the philosopher Henri Bergson. He served as Minister of Education of Greece (1945) and president of the Greek Society of Men of Letters. He traveled extensively through Germany, Italy, and Russia. Before World War II he spent most of his time on the island of Aegina devoting his time to his philosophical and literary work; his later years were spent in France. He died in Freiburg, Germany, in October 1957. His major work, Odyssey, has been described as the single most ambitious literary accomplishment of the twentieth century. John Steinbeck recognized him as "one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century," and he was acclaimed by Albert Schweitzer, Thomas Mann, and world critics as one of the most eminent writers of our time. His oeuvre consists of thirteen novels, including Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ (both of which were adapted into major feature films), eighteen dramatic works (of which seven were written in verse), three philosophical studies on Nietzsche, Bergson, and himself, a series of travel books (Greece, Spain, England, China, Japan, Israel, and Russia), and two books of poetry, Terza Rima and his monumental epic of 33, 333 verses, Odyssey, translated into English as The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel by Kimon Friar. He also wrote hundreds of articles for newspapers and encyclopedias, dozens of texts for Greek public schools, and numerous translations into modern Greek, among them Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, Goethe's Faust, Part I, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Bergson's On Laughter, and Darwin's The Origin of Species.
