Mother is considered to be the only long work of Gorky on the Russian revolutionary movement; however, of all his novels, it is possibly the least successful. Nevertheless, it remains the best known work of Gorky among the author's other important novels. He wrote the novel on a trip to the United States in 1906. The political agenda behind the novel was clear. In 1905, after the defeat of Russian's first revolution, Gorky tried to raise the spirit of the proletarian movement by conveying the political agenda among the readers through his work. He was trying to raise spirit among the revolutionaries to battle the defeatist mood. Gorky was personally connected to the novel as it is based on real life events, revolving around Anna Zalomova and her son Piotr Zalomov. Gorky, being a distant relative of Anna Zalomova who visited Gorky's family when he was a child, had a deeper connection to the story. The event took place during a May Day demonstration in Sormovo in 1902. The shipbuilding town of Sormovo was near Gorky's native town, Nizhny Novgorod, where after the arrest of Piotr Zalomov by tsarist police, his mother, Anna Zalomova followed him into revolutionary activity.]