Saadi Shirazi
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was born into a poor family of shoemakers in Dowlatabad, a remote village in Sabzevar, the northwestern part of Khorasan Province, Iran. He worked as a farmhand and attended Mas'ud Salman Elementary School. Books were a revelation to the young boy. He "read all the romances [available]... around the village". He "read on the roof of the house with a lamp…read War and Peace that way" while living in Tehran. Though his father had little formal education, he introduced Dowlatabadi to the Persian classical poets, Saadi Shirazi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi. His father generally spoke in the language of the great poets.