Premchand was born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava in 1880 in Lamahi near Varanasi. His father worked in a post office. His parents died while he was still a child and he faced extreme poverty. He was educated in a madrasa, where he studied Urdu and Persian. He eventually became a teacher and then a school inspector. He was married when only fifteen but the marriage did not work out and he married again later. He started writing stories when in his twenties but his first collection of stories was called seditious and all copies were order burned. From that time, he changed his name to Premchand, to escape censorship. He had initially written in Urdu but then switched to Hindi. In the 1920s he resigned from his teaching position to join Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement. This naturally influenced his writings. To earn money, he ran a printing press and also worked briefly in the cinema. Later in life, he turned to Marxism and remained one till his death in 1936. While he wrote many novels, stories and essays, he is best remembered for his last novel, Godhan, (The Gift of a Cow; Godan: A Novel of Peasant India), as well as for his short stories.