Zsigmond Móricz is one of the outstanding figures of twentieth-century Hungarian prose writing. He continued some valuable trends of the nineteenth-century realist tradition; his works are characterized by the vivacity of the realist approach and by social commitment. His poetics and the worldview evident in his works, however, show him to be a typical twentieth-century writer.

Móricz was born on 2 July 1879 in Tiszacsécse, a small village on the banks of the Tisza River in Szatmár County. One of the recurrent motifs in his work is the representation of this rustic world and the peasant view of life, and it is largely because of Móricz that this world was presented in a new manner on an artistic level in Hungarian literature. His father, Bálint Móricz, was an ambitious, enterprising smallholder, while his mother, Erzsé...