"In Desert and Wilderness" is a teen novel by a famous Poland writer and Nobel award-winner Henryk Sienkiewicz. It was written in 1912. The plot is set in the 19th century and it's about two friends, a 14 years old Polish boy Stanislaw and his 8 years old friend Nel for England. She was kidnapped […]
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Henryk Sienkiewicz was a Polish writer, born in 1846 in a poor noble family. Due to his poverty, he struggled in getting an education. After high school, he studied medicine and then went to study philology in Warszawa.
Soon after finishing his studied he went to Germany, France, and England and he sent his travelogue to a Polish newspaper under the pseudonym Litwos. He traveled through America and in 1891 he visited Africa which was his inspiration for "In Desert and Wilderness". His big frame was acquired by this novel that even had movie adaptations. It was his only novel for a younger audience.
When he returned to Poland he started studying history and he focused his passion on writing and he wrote a trilogy about Poland. The books of the trilogy are "With Fire and Sword", "The Deluge" and "Sir Michael". In 1895 he published "Quo Vadis", one of his most famous worked that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1905.
He was so popular in Poland that, because of the donations of his citizens, he managed to buy a family castle in which his ancestors lived.
Except for the previously mentioned novels he also wrote: "The Teutonic Knights", "On the Field of Glory", "Whirpool"…
He died in Switzerland in 1916.