From Gorky. "Books are the ladder of human progress" is the famous saying of Maxim Gorky, the great Soviet proletarian writer, poet, critic, political commentator and scholar. This sentence is a metaphor, comparing books to the ladder of human progress, thus vividly and concretely showing the important role of books in human survival. Gorky is a Soviet writer. He worked as an apprentice, dock worker, and baker in the Soviet Union. He traveled around Russia and has rich experience. He was the founder of socialist and realist literature, a statesman, a political activist, and the founder of Soviet literature. Gorky was born in a carpenter's family in 1868. His father died when he was 4 years old, and he lived with his mother at his grandfather's house. He began to make a living independently at the age of 10. He worked as an apprentice, porter, and janitor successively, and experienced first-hand the suffering of the lower class people. During this period, he studied hard and began to explore the truth about transforming society.