Danuta Mostwin, an author, psychologist and sociologist who had been a member of the Polish underground during World War II and whose fiction chronicling the experiences of Polish emigres earned her two nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature, died Monday of Parkinson's disease at her Ruxton home. She was 88.

She was born Danuta Pietruszewski in Lublin, Poland, and she completed high school in Warsaw in 1939.

She had planned to be a playwright, but turned her attention to studying for a medical career after the outbreak of World War II.

After Germany occupied her homeland, Dr. Mostwin had to study at an underground medical school held at the University of Warsaw.

During the war years, she and her family were active in the resistance movement. "The house in which she lived with her mother (her father was with part of the Polish military in London) served as a shelter and meeting point for couriers who had been parachuted into Poland," said her son, Dr. Jacek Mostwin, a urologist who lives in Ruxton.

In 1944, she met a young Polish freedom fighter, Stanislaw B. Mostwin, who became her husband.

With the end of the war and the Russian occupation of Poland, and with her husband facing arrest by the secret police, the couple and her mother fled to England.

Dr. Mostwin completed her medical education in 1948 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In 1951, the couple and their young son immigrated to New York and then to Baltimore, where Dr. Mostwin went to work for the city Department of Public Welfare.

Many of her patients were Polish immigrants who lived near Patterson Park and Fells Point, and her experiences found their way into "Asteroids," a collection of short stories that she later wrote.

After graduating in 1959 from the National Catholic School of Social Service of the Catholic University of America, she went to work as an adoption officer for the Maryland Children's Aid Society.

A scholarship from the National Institutes of Health enabled Dr. Mostwin to earn her doctorate in social work from Columbia University in 1971. From 1969 to 1980, she was a professor of social work and mental health at Catholic University.

In 1980, she established a center for the study of family mental health at Loyola College and directed a family mental health clinic at the college until retiring in 1987.

In a 2007 interview with The Baltimore Review, Dr. Mostwin explained that "I didn't become a writer; I was born a writer. From the very beginning, if I didn't write, I was talking and telling stories."

Her first novel, "The House of the Old Lady," was published in London in 1958.

In The Baltimore Review interview, Dr. Mostwin explained why she wrote her novels in Polish.

"It was a conscious choice, a conscious choice because I wanted to relay my feelings in my native tongue, and first of all it was a need like eating, breathing. Since I didn't speak in Polish in my surroundings, I needed to write in Polish as though I were talking with my family," she said.

"She wrote her books in longhand and then typed them with an IBM Selectric typewriter which had a Polish font," her son said.

The works later were translated into English.

Her experience as an immigrant became a profound influence on both her life and writing.

Some of her novels included "Beyond the Water," "The Third Value" and "Testaments." Her last novel, "Magda," was published in 2006.

Critics and scholars consider her major work to be her seven-volume Polish saga, a historical narrative that chronicles a Polish family from 1863 to the present.

Her work was nominated in 2000 and 2006 for the Nobel Prize in literature.

Dr. Mostwin, who spoke only Polish at home with her husband, explained in a 1986 interview that "I've adopted a lot of the way of American living, but I remain European, foreign, because of my accent, because of my heritage. In a way, I want to preserve that difference."

Dr. Mostwin and her friend, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, were co-founders in 1982 of the Maryland Action for Poland committee, which provided material relief to those in Poland who were affected by the declaration of martial law at that time.

"She was a freedom fighter, liberator, humanitarian, social worker and mentor. She was a legend and a pioneer both in Poland and the United States," Senator Mikulski said.

Senator Mikulski said Dr. Mostwin "shared with the world what it's like to be a Polish immigrant" in her writings.

Dr. Mostwin was a communicant of Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church, 400 S. Chester St., where a Mass of Christian burial will be offered at 10 a.m. Monday.

In addition to her husband, a retired design manager for Londontown Corp., and son, she is survived by a grandson.