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Jerzy Kosiński (name bestowed upon him by his father while in hiding from the Nazis, original name: Josek Lewinkopf) (June 18, 1933 – May 3, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish English-language novelist, with an American citizenship.

Early life

He was born in Łódź. As a child during World War II, he survived under a false identity in a Catholic Polish family in eastern Poland. A Catholic priest had issued him a forged baptismal certificate.

After World War II, Kosiński was reunited with his parents and earned degrees in history and political science in Poland (at University of Łódź), before emigrating in 1957 to the United States. In Poland he was working as an assistant in the Polish Academy of Sciences (Institute of History and Sociology).

He was a graduate of Columbia University and a fellow of Guggenheim (1967), Ford (1968) and American Academy (1970).

In the USA he was a lecturer at Yale, Princeton, Davenport and Wesleyan. Since 1965 he was an American citizen.

In 1962 he married 18-years-older American steel heiress Mary Hayward Weir, who in 1968 died of brain cancer. He later married a descendant of Bavarian aristocracy named Katherina von Fraunhofer.

Novels

Kosiński is perhaps best known for his novels The Painted Bird (1965), Steps (1968), and Being There (1971). Almost all of Kosinski's novels were on the best seller list, and they were translated into over 30 languages, with total copies estimated in the millions.

Although many readers assumed The Painted Bird was based on the author's experiences during World War II, the events depicted are now widely considered to be fictional. Describing the experiences of a boy (of unknown religious and ethnic background) wandering about a surreal Polish countryside and hiding among cruel peasants, the novel is presumably a metaphor for the human condition: alienation in a dehumanized, hostile, and thoroughly evil world. Some readers have accused Kosiński of anti-Polonism; others argue that this is a misinterpretation of the metaphoric nature of the novel. In newer editions of The Painted Bird, Kosiński explained that the characters' nationality had intentionally been left ambiguous in order to prevent that very interpretation.

Steps (1968), a novel comprising scores of loosely connected vignettes, won the National Book Award in 1969.

He was supposed to be at actress Sharon Tate's house on August 9, 1969, but was left stranded in New York after missing a connecting flight. That night, Tate was killed, along with Kosiński's friends Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski and two others, by followers of Charles Manson.

Being There was made into a 1979 movie directed by Hal Ashby, starring Peter Sellers. The screenplay was written by Kosinski, and won the 1980 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Screenplay Award, as well as the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium.

Some people believe Kosiński was a professional confabulator. In June 1982, the Village Voice accused Kosiński of plagiarism, claiming much of his work was derivative of Polish sources unfamiliar to English readers. (Being There bears a strong resemblance to Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy — The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma — a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz). The Voice also claimed that Kosiński's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors," pointing to striking stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. His defenders assert that this argument ignores the stylistic differences apparent in the work of almost any artist over a period of more than a few years.

Kosiński himself responded by writing The Hermit of 69th Street (1988), an attempt to demonstrate the absurdity of investigating prior work by inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book.

In the same Village Voice article, the public was shown a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust — a picture which was later confirmed by a Polish biographer, Joanna Siedlecka, and an American biographer, James Sloan. The Painted Bird, ostensibly semi-autobiographical, was demonstrated to be a work of fiction. Rather than wandering the Polish countryside, Kosiński had spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family and had never been appreciably mistreated. In response, Kosiński argued that he had never maintained that the book was based on true events.

TV, film, and newspaper appearances

Kosiński appeared repeatedly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, played the role of Lenin's stooge Grigory Zinoviev in Warren Beatty's film Reds, posed for the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and presented the Oscar for screenwriting in 1982.

Suicide

In 1979 Kosinski told a reporter: "I'm not a suicide freak, but I want to be free. If I ever have a terminal disease that would affect my mind or my body, I would end it."

Kosiński committed suicide on May 3, 1991, by taking a fatal dose of barbiturates, twisting a plastic shopping bag around his head, and lying down to die in water in the bathtub in his West 57th Street New York apartment.

His parting suicide note read: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity." (Newsweek, May 13 1991).

Bibliography

• The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with the Russians (1960), published under the pseudonym "Joseph Novak"
• No Third Path (1962), published under the pseudonym "Joseph Novak"
• The Painted Bird (1965)
• Steps (1969)
• Being There (1970)
• The Devil Tree (1973, revised & expanded 1982)
• Cockpit (1975)
• Blind Date (1977)
• Passion Play (1979)
• Pinball (1982)
• The Hermit of 69th Street (1988)
• Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962-1991 (1992)

Awards & honors

• Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger for The Painted Bird (France)
• 1969 -- National Book Award for Steps.
• 1970 -- Award in Literature, National Institute of Arts and Letters and American Academy of Arts and Letters.
• 1973-75 -- President of the American Chapter of P.E.N. Re-elected 1974, serving maximum 2 terms allowed.
• 1974 -- B'rith Shalom Humanitarian Freedom Award.
• 1977 -- American Civil Liberties Union First Amendment Award.
• 1979 -- Writers Guild of America Best Screenplay Award for Being There.
• 1980 -- Polonia Media Perspectives Achievement Award.
• 1981 -- British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Best Screenplay of the Year Award for Being There.
• International House Harry Edmonds Life Achievement Award.
• Received Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Hebrew Letters from Spertus College of Judaica.
• 1988 -- Received Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Humane Letters from both Albion College, Michigan.
• 1989 -- Received Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Humane Letters and State University of New York at Potsdam.

Photography

He practised the photographic arts, with one-man exhibitions to his credit in Warsaw's Crooked Circle Gallery (1957), and in the Andre Zarre Gallery in New York (1988).

Miscellaneous

• Once conducted an experiment in the difficulties of new writers to get published: 8 years after it won the National Book Award, he allowed another writer to change the title of his novel Steps and market it as his own. It was rejected by 13 agents and 14 publishers, including the outfit that had originally bought it.

• For several decades, Kosinski was famous as a wit, a great raconteur, and a media celebrity.

Further reading

• James P. Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography, Diane Pub. Co., 1996, ISBN 0788153250.
• Joanna Siedlecka, Czarny ptasior (The Black Bird), CIS, 1994, ISBN 8385458042.
• Welch D. Everman, Jerzy Kosinski: the Literature of Violation, Borgo Press, 1991, ISBN 0893702765.

External links

• The Paris Review Interview
• IMDB Bio
• 1988 RealAudio interview with Jerzy Kosiński by Don Swaim

• 1933 births
• 1991 deaths
• Polish novelists
• Jewish Polish history
• Polish-Americans
• Polish Jews
• Drug-related deaths
• Drug-related suicides
• Writers who committed suicide
• People from Łódź