Zorba the Greek (otherwise known as The Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas) was first published by Cretan author Nikos Kazantzakis in 1946, the same year that a civil war between government forces and a communist insurgency erupted in his native Greece. Through his book, Kazantzakis, who was sojourning around Western Europe at the time, gave the Western world a profoundly different picture of his homeland than would have been visible by looking at the newspapers of the time. His portrayal of Greece in Zorba the Greek was later immortalized in a 1968 film of the same name. As a consequence, the book's main character (Zorba) has come to be seen as representing many stereotypically Greek...
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