Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) was a Polish novelist and journalist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. Born into the impoverished gentry of Russian-ruled Poland, he worked as a journalist and traveled in America before writing the Trilogy, With Fire and Sword, The Deluge and Fire in the Steppe, historical novels of seventeenth-century Poland that made him the voice of a nation without a state. Quo Vadis, his novel of Christians under Nero, became an international success, and The Knights of the Cross treated the medieval struggle with the Teutonic Order. During the First World War he organized relief for Polish war victims from Switzerland, where he died.