A poet, short-story writer, novelist, and prolific writer of children's books, Branko Copic is one of the most diverse and most popular Serbian authors of the post-World War II period. Thematically, he is a distinct regionalist, for his native Bosnian Krajina is the favorite locale of his prose, a terra firma that he leaves only to follow his sturdy peasant countrymen on their disparate wartime and postwar migrations and resettlements. Yet, his authorial message is universal and enlivened with profound truths about the tenor of life in his native land both during the wartime popular struggle for survival and the postwar social upheavals engendered by the country's rapid socialization.

Copic was born on 1 January 1915 into a peasant family in the hamlet of Hasani in western Bosnia. Having completed grade school in his native village and his secondary-school education in Bihac, Banja Luka, Sarajevo, and Karlovci, he attended the...