Wonder Card

Czesław Miłosz (1911 - 2004) was a Polish-American poet, novelist and translator. After a fairly bucolic childhood in what is now part of Lithuania, amid the slightly-faded trappings of aristocracy, Miłosz family was displaced by the upheavals of WWI, then the Polish-Soviet War. He spent much of WWII in German-occupied Warsaw, where he participated in the cultural underground aided the Jewish resistance. After the war, Miłosz served as a diplomat for the new People's Republic of Poland in the U.S., but he eventually ran afoul of the communist authorities. Too ideologically-suspect to be welcomed back to the U.S., he defected to France; he was redeemed by his book The Captive Mind, a critique of totalitarianism that changed the way many Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet system. In 1960 Miłosz was offered a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for the rest of his career. Prolific but obscure both in the West and in Poland (where his work was banned), Miłosz gained much wider recognition after winning the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. His poetry is complex, but also very inclusive, and empathetic. Few poets have encompassed the madness of the 20th Century so well.