The present contribution gives an overview of the prose by the Serbian writer Dragoslav Mihailović (1930) from the early narratives to the documentary work . This opus shows, as a whole, the following features: Mihailović tells whole life stories, which put more focus on action than on psychological description. Most of the stories are dominated by a subjective point of view and are marked linguistically (dialects, sociolects, vigorous colloquiality). Mihailović’s heroes are mostly on the social fringe, yet the view of these marginalized people is less socially critical than humanistic and individualistic. Most of the fictional characters are based on actual people, whom the writer got to know at close range in the course of his odyssey – the author has become an orphan at a young age and was put into prison on Goli otok island when he was barely 20 years old.