Jan Lechon, one of the most distinguished members of PIASA and undoubtedly one of the greatest Polish poets in the modern era, was born Leszek Serafinowicz on June 13, 1899, in Russian-occupied Warsaw, and died tragically by his own hand in New York City on June 8, 1956. Known under his pseudonym as one of the foremost Polish poets of his generation, Jan Lechon was also an essayist, editor, diplomat, and political propagandist. His first small book of poems was published in 1912 when he was 14 years old. In the interwar period, as a founding member of the Skamander group, he was extremely active as poet and literary activist, but suffered from the challenge of premature success and acclaim won by the publication of his first two serious collections of poetry, “A Poem in Scarlet” (Karmazynowy pemat) in 1920 and “Silver and Black” (Srebrne i czarne) in 1924, with the result that he did not publish again until 1942. In the meantime he served as cultural attaché in France (1930-39), then fled the Nazis via Brazil to New York, where he settled in 1941, worked for Radio Free Europe and was a co-founder of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. A book of sketches on American culture in 1955, “Aut Caesar aut nihil” (“Either Caesar or Nothing”) was published in English in 1959 under the title “American Transformations”. An essentially lonely man in his last years, he took his own life in 1956 but left a fascinating three-volume diary that was not published until 1967.

For two biographies in Polish see Bartłomiej Szleszyński and Lilliana Osses Adams