Yasunari Kawabata is best known in the West for his novels Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and Sound of the Mountain, and for his early short story The Izu Dancer. Kawabata began writing in the early 1920s while he was still a student at Tokyo Imperial University. Soon thereafter he became one of the chief proponents of a new school of Japanese writing, breaking away from the extremes of realism typical of Japanese literature and attempting to develop a new, impressionistic approach. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1958 and died in 1972.