Władysław Reymont

Born in 1867 in Kobiele Wielkie to a village organist's family, Reymont cycled through an unusual string of jobs before turning to writing (traveling actor, railway worker, novice monk, shop apprentice), unsettled work he later credited with feeding a novelist's eye for the whole range of Polish social types.

A serious train accident in 1900 left him with lasting injuries but also a legal settlement that finally gave him the financial security to write full-time. He spent extended periods living directly among peasant communities in central Poland gathering material for The Peasants, his four-volume epic of one village moving through a full cycle of seasons, published between 1904 and 1909.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924 and died in Warsaw the following year, having lived just long enough to see The Peasants crowned as one of the era's great achievements of European naturalism.