Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 - December 30, 1944) was a French writer. His first book was published in 1902, when he was already 36 years old. Thirteen years later, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature 1915 for his most important work, Jean-Christophe. His mind sculpted by a passion for music and hero-worship, he sought a means of communion among men for his entire life. Because of his insistence upon justice and his humanist ideal, he looked for peace during and after the First World War in the works of the philosophers of India ("Conversations with Rabindranath Tagore", and Mohandas Gandhi), then in the new world that the Soviet Union initially wanted to achieve. But he would not find peace except in writing his works.