Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz ( ; ; 5 May 1846 – 15 November 1916), also known by the pseudonym Litwos , was a Polish epic writer. He is remembered for his historical novels, such as the Trilogy series and especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis (1895–1896).

Born into an impoverished Polish noble family in the Kingdom of Poland, at the time part of the Russian Empire, he began publishing journalistic and literary pieces in the late 1860s. In the late 1870s he traveled to the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. In the 1880s he began serializing novels that further increased his popularity. He soon became one of the most popular Polish writers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and numerous translations gained him international renown, culminating in his receipt of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer".

Many of his novels remain in print. In Poland he is known for his "Trilogy" of historical novels—With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Sir Michael—set in the 17th-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; internationally he is known for Quo Vadis, set in Nero's Rome. The Trilogy and Quo Vadis have been filmed, the latter several times, with Hollywood's 1951 version receiving the most international recognition.

Life Early life Sienkiewicz came into the world on 5 May 1846 in Wola Okrzejska, Lublin Governorate, now a village in the central part of the eastern Polish region of Lubelskie in the Kingdom of Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. More cautiously, he called on Russia's government to introduce reforms in Russian-controlled Congress Poland. However, as Russia (of which Sienkiewicz was a citizen) was not a signatory to the Berne Convention, he rarely received any royalties from the translations.

Named for Sienkiewicz, in Poland, are numerous streets and squares (the first street to bear his name was in Lwów, in 1907). A Sienkiewcz Mound stands at Okrzeja, near his birthplace, Wola Okrzejska. Nonetheless, the Polish historian of literature Henryk Markiewicz, writing the Polski słownik biograficzny (Polish Biographical Dictionary) entry on Sienkiewicz (1997), describes him as a master of Polish prose, as the foremost Polish writer of historical fiction, and as Poland's internationally best-known writer.