The author, writing in a Poland that had been partitioned a century earlier by Russia, Prussia and Austria, sought to bring attention to the plight of rural Poland, which had to contend with poverty, ignorance, neglect by the country's upper crust, and colonization by German settlers backed by Otto von Bismarck's German government.

Written in installments, The Outpost was serialized in the illustrated weekly, Wędrowiec [pl] (The Wanderer) between March 19, 1885, and May 20, 1886.

Its principal character, a peasant surnamed Ślimak ("Snail", in Polish), typifies his village's inhabitants, nearly all illiterate; there is no school under Russian imperial rule.

Ślimak suffers a series of adversities as he refuses to sell his plot of land to German settlers (who are described not unsympathetically).

Despite Prus' reservations about Émile Zola's naturalism, the Polish writer took some inspirations from the French novelist.

Prus' Outpost (1885–86) in turn influenced the Polish Nobel Prize in Literature-winning novelist Władysław Reymont's treatment, two decades later, of rural life in The Peasants (1904–1909).