Rybakov grew up and continues to live in Moscow. He worked as a transport engineer, both civilian and military, from 1934 to 1946. After World War II he turned to literature, drawing in part on his previous professional experiences, in the "industrial novel" The Drivers (1950), which was awarded the Stalin Prize, and in Yekaterina Voronina (1955). He also wrote three short novels about a teenage boy, all narrated by the youthful protagonist. Rybakov first attracted international attention with Heavy Sand (1978), a highly readable novel about a Jewish family in the Soviet Union between 1910 and 1943. The subject was unusual for the time, but Rybakov's handling of it, though honest in many respects, was undercut by subtle, yet unmistakable, political orthodoxy. More recently, he has begun to publish a series of novels about the terror of the Stalin years, starting with Children of Arbat, on which he worked from the end of the 1950s until 1982. It was announced for publication twice, in 1966 and in 1978, before finally appearing in 1987. Regarded as a milestone of glasnost, it follows a group of young Muscovites to show the effects of the gathering political storm in the 1930s. Rybakov continues to trace the fate of his protagonists---and outline the period's bloody history---in the next novel in the series, Fear.