Nationalism About the Author A Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature, music and Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Tagore is known mostly for his poetry, though he wrote novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas and thousands of songs. Tagore wrote autobiographies and his non-fiction grappled with history, linguistics and spirituality. Harvard University Press collaborated with Visva-Bharati University to publish the Essential Tagore, the largest anthology of Tagore’s works available in English, in 2011. it marks the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth.