The German author Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621"-1676) is best known for his picaresque romance, "Simplicissimus," the greatest 17th-century German prose work.

There is little accurate information about Jakob von Grimmelshausen. Some of his ancestors were Protestants and became wine growers, innkeepers, and bakers. Grimmelshausen was born in Gelnhausen, Hesse. The description of the early life of Simplicissimus in the Thirty Years War is to some degree autobiographical. Grimmelshausen spent some years as soldier's boy and wagoner in the imperial forces; he served as musketeer and later as secretary in the Schauenburg regiment. A year after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) he married Catharina Henninger, the 21-year-old daughter of a lieutenant in Schauenburg's army. Later, in the service of Lt. Col. Schauenburg, Grimmelshausen was a bailiff--an office which he held until ca. 1659. He then became an innkeeper. Finally, from 1667 he was a magistrate who collected taxes and administrated...