The family moved to Tuszyn when Reymont was one year old. Having spent his childhood there, he was sent by his father to a Warsaw tailor to learn the trade. In Warsaw he completed a Sunday Workers' School and, to qualify as a journeyman, he presented to the commission self-made tails that apparently were well-fitting. At the age of eighteen he joined a travelling acting company, but his family got him a job of a junior clerk at the Warsaw-Vienna Railway and he had to cope with boredom at the little stations in Rogow, Krosnowa and Lipce. He tried his hand in acting again, and in 1890 attached himself to a neophyte of mysterious knowledge, a fellow called Puszow, and left with him for Germany to spread spiritualism. He then tried being a novice at the Jasna Góra Monastery, but ended up again working at a railway station.
After his unexpected literary debut of 1894, he moved to Warsaw and decided to live by writing. After his finances improved, he travelled extensively, visiting London, Berlin, Italy and Paris in the 1890s. While in Paris he made some valuable literary friends, in particular with Stanisław Przybyszewski, Stefan Żeromski, Zenon Przesmycki, and met Frank-Luis Schoell, who would later produce an excellent translation of Chłopi (The Peasants).
In 1900 Reymont was badly injured in a train accident and was awarded high damages. While his injuries were treated in Kraków, he was looked after by an acquaintance, Aurelia Szabłowska, who ended up divorcing her husband, marrying Reymont, and introducing order into his turbulent life. They travelled a lot together and lived through the 1905 revolution and World War I in Warsaw.
Reymont was involved in a range of activities. He was chairman of the Union of Writers and Journalists and of the Warsaw Assistance Fund for Men of Letters and Journalists. He helped to set up the first filmmaking cooperative. After the war, in 1919-20, he travelled to the United States and sought economic assistance of the American Poles to help rebuild his destroyed country. In 1920 he bought the Kolaczkowo estate. Farming did not go well, especially that Reymont's poor health made him stay mostly at the Riviera. He was buried at the Powazki Cemetery, but his heart was deposited at the Holy Cross Church.
Right-wing political organizations tried to use Reymont's growing fame to their advantage. Reymont had been friends with, and benefited from the backing and financial assistance of key people of National Democracy, including Jan Popławski, Roman Dmowski and Marian Kiniorski. In 1925 he was an honorary guest of a large peasant demonstration organized by the PSL Piast leader Wincenty Witos in Wierzchosławice, his native village. While affiliations with the ideology of these organizations can be found in Reymont's works, they seem to have had little impact on him as a writer. For Reymont was a rare example of an outstanding, naturally talented reporter, who absorbed reality with all his senses and was able to present it in broad social panoramas. Neither the naturalism and realism of his works nor the elements of Young Poland's (Młoda Polska's) poetics resulted from some adopted literary doctrine - they were the effect of his way of observation and assimilation of the world. Naturally, the trends of the time had some impact, yet his works (with one exception) are about the reality which he himself experienced: the villages around Łowicz, big towns, provincial railway stations and travelling theatres, the world of spiritists and mediums, the life of the Polish American community. His books give a truly kaleidoscopic view of the Polish society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Reymont started to write in order to fill the void of the barren life of a railway clerk. He initially wrote poems and recorded daily events, later moving to short stories and novellas. People around him sneered at his literary aspirations. However, in 1892 he sent a novella Śmierć (The Death) and some correspondence to Ignacy Matuszewski of the Warsaw Głos and, to his surprise, they appeared in print. After this debut Kraków's Myśl accepted a few other novellas. This gave the penniless Reymont the courage to move to Warsaw and live solely by writing. He wrote a dozen more novellas and they appeared in the volumes Spotkanie (The Meeting, 1897), Sprawiedliwie (In a Fair Manner, 1899), W Jesienną Noc (An Autumn Night, 1900), Krosnowa i Świat (Krosnowa and The World , 1928).
A breakthrough in his literary career occurred with his reportage The Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra. On the centenary of the Kosciuszko Insurrection, lots of praying pilgrims were on their way to Czestochowa. A correspondent of Tygodnik Ilustrowany, Reymont melted into the crowd, travelled the whole way, and created a picture of an occasional community consisting of various, colourful individuals united by religious experience.
Over the following ten years Reymont wrote four large novels; all of them made it to history of literature. He wrote them in installments, week by week, and had them published in the press. He introduced few changes to later book versions. Then his talent distinctly waned, perhaps due to illness.