Witold Gombrowicz

Gombrowicz sailed for Buenos Aires on a transatlantic liner's maiden voyage in August 1939; when Germany invaded Poland days later he simply didn't go home, spending the next twenty-four years in Argentina largely broke, working for a time as a bank clerk. He wrote a sprawling personal Diary throughout those years, using it to needle Polish émigré orthodoxy, literary fashion, and his own pretensions with equal relish.

European recognition came late and mostly through French translation and the advocacy of friends back in Paris; he finally left Argentina in 1963, married his companion Rita Labrosse, and settled in France, where asthma killed him in 1969, just as Cosmos, his late paranoid masterpiece, was securing his reputation as one of the century's essential ironists.