Alojz Adamič immigrated to the United States when he was just 15 years old. As Louis Adamic, he became one of his adopted country’s most well-known writers.

Adamic was born into a peasant family in the village of Blato, not far from Ljubljana, in 1898. Despite his modest upbringing, he attended secondary school in Ljubljana, where he became involved with a group of students advocating South Slavic autonomy and opposing the repressive policies of the Austro-Hungarian authorities in Vienna. This was considered highly subversive at the time, and when Adamic was involved in a 1913 demonstration that turned violent, he was first arrested and then expelled from his school. Aged just 15, he decided to immigrate to America. Even though he knew no-one in the United States, Adamic lied about his age to circumvent Austrian emigration restrictions that applied to young men nearing military draft age, and made his way to the New World in 1916.

Two years after his arrival, Adamic became a U.S. citizen. He briefly returned to Europe in 1918 as an American soldier on the Western Front. Even after the war, however, he maintained a strong bond with Slovenia and the Yugoslav idea. From the ranks of manual laborer, Adamic rose to become an editor of a Yugoslav newspaper in New York. He found his voice as an expert on Yugoslavia, but also an outspoken critic of King Alexander’s absolute monarchy.

It was this passion for his homeland that led Adamic to write The Native’s Return, his best known work and a major bestseller in the United States. In the book, Adamic vividly described life in what was then Yugoslavia. The book helped Adamic to become a part of prestigious American literary circles, and he established connections with writers ranging from H. L. Mencken to Rex Stout. Having penned a number of popular titles, both fiction and non-fiction, Adamic was, by the 1930s, one of the most recognizable authors in the U.S. He was a critic of America’s “Melting Pot,” arguing that the process of assimilation was too slow and could pose a threat to the country’s future. Interwar labor relations were another frequent object of his passionate criticism.

The outbreak of World War II also made Adamic a prominent political figure. As a socialist and a supporter of Yugoslav unity, Adamic became an outspoken advocate of Josip Broz Tito and his Partisan movement. He was determined to persuade the Allies to grant recognition to Tito’s government, and then continued his relationship with Yugoslavia’s Communist regime after the war. His book Dinner at the White House, an incisive portrait of a wartime dinner party conversation between Roosevelt and Churchill, brought Adamic considerable attention, but his Communist sympathies prompted the FBI to investigate him.

Adamic suffered from poor health and he died in 1951 – officially as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Conspiracy theorists have never accepted suicide as the real cause of death, however, and various theories abound about who may have wanted to get rid of a prominent, politically engaged writer. One of those who doubted the official explanation was the writer Rex Stout, and Adamic’s death inspired Stout’s novel The Black Mountain, which deals with Yugoslav political intrigue.

No matter what happened on that fateful day in 1951, Adamic, the boy who came to the U.S. at the age of 15, is now recognized one of the leading American chroniclers of 20th century politics and life.