Born into an impoverished noble family, Reymont was educated to become a master tailor, but instead worked as a gateman at a railway station and then as an actor in a troupe.

Reymont's first successful and widely praised novel was The Promised Land from 1899, which brought attention to the bewildering social inequalities, poverty, conflictive multiculturalism and labour exploitation in the industrial city of Łódź (Lodz).

Władysław Reymont was popular in communist Poland due to his style of writing and the symbolism he used, including socialist concepts, romantic portrayal of the agrarian countryside and toned criticism of capitalism, all present in literary realism.

Kazimierz Wyka, an enthusiast of Reymont's work, believes that the alteration could also have been intended to remove any association with the word rejmentować, which in some local Polish dialects means "to swear".

Reymont was defiantly stubborn; after a few years of education in the local school, he was sent by his father to Warsaw into the care of his eldest sister and her husband to teach him his vocation.

Without a penny to his name, he then returned to Tuszyn after a year, and, thanks to his father's connections, he took up employment as a gateman at a railway crossing near Koluszki for 16 rubles a month.

Reymont visited the editorial offices of newspapers and magazines, and eventually met other writers who became interested in his talent including Świętochowski.

[2] Rejmont sent his short stories to different magazines and, encouraged by good reviews, decided to write novels: Komediantka (The Deceiver) (1895) and Fermenty (Ferments) (1896).

The earnings from this book Ziemia Obiecana (The Promised Land) (1899) enabled him to go on his next trip to France where he socialized with other exiled Poles (Jan Lorentowicz, Żeromski, Przybyszewski and Lucjan Rydel).

In 1925, somewhat recovered, he went to a farmers' meeting in Wierzchosławice near Kraków, where Wincenty Witos welcomed him as a member of the Polish People's Party "Piast" and praised his writing skills.

There are works of reportage: Pielgrzymka do Jasnej Góry (Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra) (1894), Z ziemi chełmskiej (From the Chełm Lands) (1910 – about the persecutions of the Uniates), Z konstytucyjnych dni (From the Days of the Constitution) (about the revolution of 1905).

With little higher education and inability to read another language, Reymont realized that it was his knowledge of grounded reality, not literary theory, that was his strong suit.

His novel Komediantka paints the drama of a rebellious girl from the provinces who joins a traveling theatre troupe and finds, instead of escape from the mendacity of her native surroundings, a nest of intrigue and sham.

Ziemia Obiecana (The Promised Land), possibly Reymont's best-known novel, is a social panorama of the city of Łódź during the industrial revolution, full of dramatic detail, presented as an arena of the struggle for survival.

This dark vision of cynicism, illustrating the bestial qualities of men and the law of the jungle, where ethics, noble ideas and holy feelings turn against those who believe in them, are, as the author intended, at the same time a denunciation of industrialisation and urbanisation.

[citation needed] He set the action in Lipce, a real village which he came to know during his work on the railway near Skierniewice, and restricted the time of events to ten months in the unspecified "now" of the 19th century.

The story was a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and was banned from 1945 to 1989 in communist Poland, along with George Orwell's similar novella, Animal Farm (published in Britain in 1945).