Tyrmand emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1966 and five years later married an American, Mary Ellen Fox.

He went to Paris, where he studied for a year at the faculty of architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts.

[3] Tyrmand was on vacation in Warsaw when the War broke out, so he interrupted his studies and worked in smuggling in the area of the Western Bug, helping people to cross from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union.

At that time Andrzej Miłosz was collaborating with the Home Army (a movement of Polish Resistance), and reproached Tyrmand for writing for a Russian propaganda outlet.

He tried to escape to neutral Sweden, but was caught in Norwegian port of Stavanger, and sent to the Grini concentration camp in Norway, where he managed to survive the rest of the war.

[4] Although his mother Maryla (Marisha) survived the war, she lost the rest of her entire family in the Warsaw Ghetto, with the exception of her son Leopold.

[3] While Tyrmand was perceived as an opponent of communism and the socialist systems, the diary makes little mention of politics, focusing instead in a sarcastic condemnation of society and the cultural and economic backwardness of the Polish People's Republic.

[3] The writer, known for his uncompromising and unconventional lifestyle (he was famous for his colorful socks known as bikiniarze), became the leader of the emerging jazz movement in Poland.

[3] Mary Ellen Tyrmand co-authored a book, published in Poland in 2012 titled: "Tyrmandowie Romans Amerykanski."

[7] He became the co-founder and vice-president of the Rockford Institute, a conservative foundation critical of American publishing values and their apparent bias toward liberal writers.

[3] Diary 1954 (Polish: Dziennik 1954) is a semi-autobiographical chronicle that analyzes the life in the Communist Poland and exposes the lies and absurdities of Soviet Russia backed regimes.

[7] Although Tyrmand had put aside work on the book, he resumed it after an independent media outlet (Tygodnik Powszechny[6]) he was collaborating with was forced to close after refusing to publish an obituary and mourn Stalin's death.

[3][5] Published in 1955, The Man With White Eyes broke with the socialist realism in Poland by showing that under an officially promoted image of Warsaw, a world of crime existed untouched by an inefficient police.

The novel is critical of the moral environment of the Polish intelligentsia of the time, exposing them as servile and subservient to the regime.

The book is written in the form of a "roman à clef", which is a novel with fictional characters that can be easily identified as counterparts of real-life people, in this case, names from the Polish cultural scene at the time.

[3] Tyrmand books include Kultura Essays, Explorations in Freedom, Notebooks of a Dilettante, and On the Border of Jazz.