Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity. In the years of loneliness, Milosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and preoccupations and enjoying the devotion of his students at the University of California where, in 1961, he was appointed Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His international fame came like lightning, when he won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.