His father, a Russian, Aleksander Mikhailovich Sholokhov (1865–1925), was a member of the lower middle class, at various times a farmer, a cattle trader, and a miller.

[3] Sholokhov attended schools in Karginskaya [ru], Moscow, Boguchar, and Veshenskaya until 1918, when he joined the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War at the age of 13.

First rumors of Sholokhov's supposed plagiarism appeared in 1928 following the success of the first two volumes of And Quiet Flows the Don: it was speculated that the author stole the manuscript from a dead White Army officer.

[6][7] Sholokhov asked the Pravda newspaper to prove his authorship, submitting his manuscripts of the first three volumes of And Quiet Flows the Don and the plan of the fourth one.

[1][10][11] In 1984 Norwegian Slavicist and mathematician Geir Kjetsaa, in a monograph written with three other colleagues, provided statistical analyses of sentence lengths showing that Mikhail Sholokhov was likely the true author of And Quiet Flows the Don.

[12][13] The debate focused on the published book, because Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid during the Second World War and no manuscript material or drafts were known.

143 pages of the manuscript of the 3rd & 4th books were later found and returned to Sholokhov; since 1975, they have been held by the Pushkin House in St Petersburg.

In 1999 the Russian Academy of Science carried out an analysis of the manuscript and came to the conclusion that And Quiet Flows the Don had been written by Sholokhov himself.

[15] A lengthy analysis by Felix Kuznetsov of the creative process visible in the papers provides detailed support for Sholokhov's authorship.

[9] During the 2000s a Russian-Israeli linguist Zeev Bar-Sella once again stated that Sholokhov was not the true author of And Quiet Flows the Don as well as the other works attributed to him.

[16] Sholokhov met Joseph Stalin in 1930, and subsequently was one of very few people who dared to give the dictator a truthful account of what was happening in the country and nonetheless was not punished.

In the 1930s, he wrote several letters to Stalin from his home in Veshenskaya about the appalling conditions in the kolkhozes and sovkhozes along the Don, requesting assistance for the farmers.

After their meeting, on 4 November 1937, Lugovoi and two other prisoners on whose behalf Sholokhov had interceded were released, but in a subsequent letter to Stalin, he complained that the people responsible for wrongfully arresting them had not been punished.

On 23 October 1938, Sholokhov met Stalin in the Kremlin to complain that he had been put under surveillance in Veshenskaya, but when Yezhov was summoned to explain, he claimed not to know why.

He commented on the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial at the 23rd Congress by saying that the prison terms meted out to Sinyavsky and Daniel had been much too lenient compared to the "revolutionary understanding of what is right" during the 1920s, which turned part of the Soviet intelligentsia against him and resulted in two open letters by Lydia Chukovskaya and Yuri Galanskov addressed to Sholokhov.

He used his Order of Lenin money to build a local school and his Nobel Prize to take the family on a road trip over Europe and Japan.