Henryk Adam Alexander Pius Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was born in Wola Okrzejska, Poland. He studied at Warsaw, traveled in the USA, and in the 1870s began to write articles, short stories, and novels. His major work was a war trilogy about seventeenth-century Poland, consisting of Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword, 1884), Potop (The Deluge, 1886), and Pan Wolodyjowski (Fire in the Steppe, 1888). His most widely known book is Quo Vadis, which has been filmed several times, most notably in 1951 by Mervyn LeRoy. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.
