Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gorky adopted the pseudonym in 1892 when his first short story, "Makar Chudra", was published in the Tiflis newspaper Kavkaz. The name comes from the Russian word for "bitter" and reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and his determination to speak the bitter truth.
Maxim Gorky was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He never won the prize.
Gorky first met Lenin in 1902 and became a personal friend, though their relationship was always rocky. By the time of the Russian Civil War, Gorky had published Untimely Thoughts (1918), a collection of essays calling Lenin a tyrant for senseless arrests, comparing him to the Tsar and to Nechayev, and accusing him of experimenting on the "living flesh of Russia." Lenin in turn described Gorky as "always supremely spineless in politics."
Gorky returned on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation, having first visited in May 1928. By 1928 he was having difficulty earning enough in Sorrento to support his large household, and he began seeking accommodation with the communist regime. Stalin was equally keen to use Gorky as a propaganda asset. On returning, Gorky was decorated with the Order of Lenin and given a mansion formerly belonging to the millionaire Pavel Ryabushinsky.
Gorky died from pneumonia in June 1936 in Moscow, where he had spent his final period under unannounced house arrest. His son Maxim Peshkov had died in May 1934. At the Bukharin trial in 1938, one of the charges was that Gorky was killed by Yagoda's NKVD agents. Several historians hold that both Gorky and his son were poisoned by NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda on Stalin's orders, using substances developed at a special NKVD laboratory.
Mother (1906) is Gorky's best-known novel, though Gorky himself called it "an unsuccessful thing" that was "long, boring and carelessly written." The play The Lower Depths (1902) is the only one of his dramatic works to retain a significant position in Western theatre. Among critics, The Life of Klim Samgin (1927-1936) and The Artamonov Business (1925) are sometimes regarded as his finest literary achievements.