Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621/22 – 17 August 1676)[2] was one of the most notable German authors of the 17th century.

At the age of ten, he was kidnapped by Hessian soldiers, and in their midst experienced military life in the Thirty Years' War.

At the close of the war, Grimmelshausen entered the service of Franz Egon von Fürstenberg, Catholic bishop of Strasbourg.

[2] Grimmelshausen's work is greatly influenced by previous utopian and travel literature, and the Simplicissimus series attained a readership larger than any other seventeenth-century novel.

Simplicissimus has been interpreted as its author's autobiography; he begins with the childhood of his hero, and describes the latter's adventures amid the stirring scenes of the Thirty Years' War.