Discipline: Literature

Leopold Tyrmand

Discipline: Literature
MacDowell Fellowships: 1970
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Leopold Tyrmand (1920–1985) was a Polish-Jewish novelist, writer, and editor. In 1938 he graduated from the Warsaw Gymnasium. He went to Paris, where he studied for a year with the faculty of architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. It was there he was introduced to Western European culture and American jazz. Both of these fascinations left a lasting mark on his work. Tyrmand emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1966. He served as editor of an anti-communist monthly Chronicles of Culture with John A. Howard. In 1954, he wrote a diary, which he later edited and released in 1980 as Dziennik 1954; it has been translated into English and was published in 2014 as Diary 1954. The book, which gives a unique description of the daily life in Stalinist Poland, is now considered to be one of his greatest achievements.