Which author wrote War and Peace?

Tolstoy, published serially from 1865 and as a book in 1869 - about 580,000 words with several hundred characters, of whom around 160 are real historical figures. His wife Sophia is said to have copied out the manuscript by hand multiple times, working from drafts he revised continuously.

He did not consider it a novel. He wrote that it was not a novel, still less a poem, still less a historical chronicle, and that Russian literature since Pushkin had repeatedly declined to fit European forms - which is a fair warning, since the book stops for long essays on the nature of history arguing that great men do not cause events and that Napoleon was carried by forces he mistook for his own decisions.

Tolstoy then rejected most of his own work. In his fifties he had a religious crisis, concluded that his novels were self-indulgent and that Christianity required literal non-violence and the renunciation of property, and spent his last decades writing pamphlets while quarrelling with a wife who had thirteen children with him and did not want to give away the estate. He died at 82 in a railway station master's house, having left home in the middle of the night to live as a wanderer. His influence on Gandhi, who corresponded with him, is direct.