Rabindranath Tagore

(1861 - 1941)

Born in 1861 in Calcutta, Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The Bengali poet—and short-story writer, playwright, composer, essayist, and late-blooming painter of at least 2,500 works—composed verse that often seemed untranslatable, the English versions failing to give off the sheen and insight of the Bengali originals. “For Bengalis,” noted one New York Times writer, “Tagore is Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Andy Warhol and Steven Sondheim—with a dash of Martin Luther King Jr.—rolled into one.”