These early experiences may have precipitated the panic disorder and agoraphobia that dogged him through life, and shaped his opposition to attempting to regain Poland's independence by force of arms.

Pharaoh, Prus's only historical novel, is a study of political power and of the fates of nations, set in ancient Egypt at the fall of the 20th Dynasty and New Kingdom.

Aleksander was the younger son of Antoni Głowacki, an estate steward at the village of Żabcze, in Hrubieszów County, and Apolonia Głowacka (née Trembińska).

In 1856 Prus was orphaned by his father's death and, aged 9, began attending a Lublin primary school whose principal, Józef Skłodowski, grandfather of the future double Nobel laureate Maria Skłodowska-Curie,[4] administered canings (a customary mode of disciplining) to wayward pupils, including the spirited Aleksander.

Leon, during a June 1863 mission to Wilno (now Vilnius) in Lithuania for the Polish insurgent government, developed a debilitating mental illness that would end only with his death in 1907.

[8] On 1 September 1863, twelve days after his sixteenth birthday, Prus took part in a battle against Russian forces at a village called Białka, four kilometers south of Siedlce.

On 30 April, however, the Lublin District military head credited Prus's time spent under arrest and, on account of the 16-year-old's youth, decided to place him in the custody of his uncle Klemens Olszewski.

"[14] As a newspaper columnist, Prus commented on the achievements of scholars and scientists such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and Henry Thomas Buckle;[15] urged Poles to study science and technology and to develop industry and commerce;[16] encouraged the establishment of charitable institutions to benefit the underprivileged;[16] described the fiction and nonfiction works of fellow writers such as H. G. Wells;[17] and extolled man-made and natural wonders such as the Wieliczka Salt Mine,[18] an 1887 solar eclipse that he witnessed at Mława,[19] planned building of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 Paris Exposition,[20] and Nałęczów, where he vacationed for 30 years.

[25] Of contemporary thinkers, the one who most influenced Prus and other writers of the Polish "Positivist" period (roughly 1864–1900) was Herbert Spencer, the English sociologist who coined the phrase, "survival of the fittest."

[28] After Prus began writing regular weekly newspaper columns, his finances stabilized, permitting him on 14 January 1875 to marry a distant cousin on his mother's side, Oktawia Trembińska.

He refused, and, on 26 March 1878, several of them surrounded him outside his home, where he had returned shortly before in the company (for his safety) of two fellow writers; one of the students, Jan Sawicki, slapped Prus's face.

In 1882, on the recommendation of an earlier editor-in-chief, the prophet of Polish Positivism, Aleksander Świętochowski, Prus succeeded to the editorship of the Warsaw daily Nowiny (News).

[43] In an 1884 newspaper column, published two decades before the Wright brothers flew, Prus anticipated that powered flight would not bring humanity closer to universal comity: "Are there among flying creatures only doves, and no hawks?

[17] In time, Prus adopted the French Positivist critic Hippolyte Taine's concept of the arts, including literature, as a second means, alongside the sciences, of studying reality,[45][46] and he devoted more attention to his sideline of short-story writer.

Prus's stories, which met with great acclaim, owed much to the literary influence of Polish novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and, among English-language writers, to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.

[49] The prevalence of themes from everyday life is consistent with the Polish Positivist artistic program, which sought to portray the circumstances of the populace rather than those of the Romantic heroes of an earlier generation.

At the latter Swiss town he stayed two months (July–August), nursing his agoraphobia and spending much time with his friends, the promising young writer Stefan Żeromski and his wife Oktawia.

[56] The final stage of Prus's journey took him to Paris, where he was prevented by his agoraphobia from crossing the Seine River to visit the city's southern Left Bank.

[58] Over the years, Prus lent his support to many charitable and social causes, but there was one event he came to rue for the broad criticism it brought him: his participation in welcoming Russia's tsar during Nicholas II's 1897 visit to Warsaw.

"[61] In 1908, Prus serialized, in the Warsaw Tygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly), his novel Dzieci (Children), depicting the young revolutionaries, terrorists and anarchists of the day – an uncharacteristically humorless work.

On 19 May 1912, in his Warsaw apartment at 12 Wolf Street (ulica Wilcza 12), near Triple Cross Square, his forty-year journalistic and literary career came to an end when the 64-year-old author died.

[66] Thousands attended his 22 May 1912 funeral service at St. Alexander's Church on nearby Triple Cross Square (Plac Trzech Krzyży) and his interment at Powązki Cemetery.

[72] In 1902 the editor of the Warsaw Kurier Codzienny (Daily Courier) had opined that, if Prus's writings had been well known abroad, he should have received one of the recently created Nobel Prizes.

[78] Joseph Conrad, during his 1914 visit to Poland just as World War I was breaking out, "delighted in his beloved Prus" and read everything by the ten-years-older, recently deceased author that he could get his hands on.

"[82] Pharaoh, a study of political power, became the favorite novel of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, prefigured the fate of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and continues to point analogies to more recent times.

"[85] This was due in part to Pharaoh having been composed complete prior to newspaper serialization, rather than being written in installments just before printing, as was the case with Prus's earlier major novels.

Between 1897 and 1899 Prus serialized in the Warsaw Daily Courier (Kurier Codzienny) a monograph on The Most General Life Ideals (Najogólniejsze ideały życiowe), which systematized ethical ideas that he had developed over his career regarding happiness, utility and perfection in the lives of individuals and societies.

"[95] On the front of Warsaw's present-day ulica Wilcza 12 (12 Wolf Street), the site of Prus' last home, is a plaque commemorating the earlier, now-nonexistent building's most famous resident.

A few hundred meters from there, ulica Bolesława Prusa (Bolesław Prus Street) debouches into the southeast corner of Warsaw's Triple Cross Square.

[96] In 1937, plaques were installed at Warsaw's Krakowskie Przedmieście 4 and 7, where the two chief characters of Prus' novel The Doll, Stanisław Wokulski and Ignacy Rzecki, respectively, were deduced to have resided.