Vasily Semyonovich Grossman, born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman, was a distinguished Soviet writer and journalist, renowned for his vivid war correspondence and groundbreaking literary works. Born into a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman initially pursued a career in chemical engineering, earning his degree from Moscow State University. He worked in Stalino (now Donetsk) before transitioning to a full-time writing career in the 1930s, publishing numerous short stories and several novels.

During the Second World War, Grossman served as a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, where he penned firsthand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. His reports on the discovery of a Nazi extermination camp, following the liberation of Treblinka, were among the earliest written accounts of a Nazi death camp, and his work was later used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials.

Grossman's faith in the Soviet state was shaken by the antisemitic policies of Stalin's regime in the late years of the dictator's rule. Although he was never arrested, his major works, Life and Fate and Everything Flows, were censored by the Khrushchev government, deemed as anti-Soviet. The KGB searched Grossman's apartment, seizing manuscripts, notes, and even typewriter ribbons. Mikhail Suslov warned Grossman that Life and Fate could not be published for several hundred years. Despite this, hidden copies were smuggled out of the Soviet Union, leading to their publication in the West in 1980 and in the Soviet Union in 1988, during the openness phase of Mikhail Gorbachev's government.

Grossman's contributions to literature and journalism have been recognized as monumental, with his works now hailed as literary masterpieces of the 20th century.