His family was of the lower middle class. His father was a windmill owner in Kobiala Wielka, then in Russian Poland, where the author was born in 1868. He went to the village school and attended to the cattle and farm work. One of the interpreters of Reymont to Americans has been Rupert Hughes; in the translation of his Preface to the German edition of _The Peasants_ we read,[168] “Reymont was born to be the epic poet of the Polish village. He is, in spite of his foreign name, a child of that strange, uncouth world where he began his life among goose boys and cowherders, where he drove the herds of his father, the village organist, and whence he has climbed to the rank of a beloved and recognized poet, spending a large part of his life in Paris, the centre of modern culture.” Reymont attended some of the gymnasiums, or High Schools, but he was defiant to the Russian demand _not_ to speak in Polish; sometimes he was expelled.[169] Several trades and occupations gave Reymont experiences which he has used in some of his fiction. He was a clerk in a store, railway employee, telegraph operator, and longed to travel like the hero of _The Dreamer_. For a time he was actor in a small company whose reflections are found in _The Comedienne_ and _Lilly_. He was, also, a novitiate with the Paulist Fathers for a time at Czenstochowa. _The Promised Land_, with scenes laid at Lotz and indications of revolt against the capitalists and landowners (on the part of the proletariat) was a forerunner of his agrarian novel, _The Peasants_. The earlier book has been compared with Zola’s _Germinal_ in intense naturalism. In this long story, _The Peasants_, Reymont became the “mouthpiece of the peasant and rural elements.” Combined with Reymont’s devotion to the peasant village as “protagonist,” is his passion for Nature in her varied aspects; hence he made his divisions of the book to show the four seasons. Like Thomas Hardy and George Meredith he uses Nature as a vital personality in his story, aiding or restraining the development of his leading characters, especially Yagna, who has been called “a Polish Tess.” The English author is superior in condensation and dramatic sympathy.