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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, who acquired American citizenship.

Early life

He was born in Łódź. As a child during World War II, he survived under a false identity in a Roman Catholic Polish family in eastern Poland. A Roman 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), and worked as an assistant in the Polish Academy of Sciences (Institute of History and Sociology). In 1957 he emigrated to the United States.

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

In the USA he was a lecturer at Yale, Princeton, Davenport University, and Wesleyan. In 1965 he became 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 Katherina von Fraunhofer, a descendant of Bavarian aristocracy.

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 some readers assumed The Painted Bird was based on the author's experiences during World War II, the book was published and marketed as "fiction". Most of 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. It was described by Arthur Miller and Elie Wiesel as one of the most important books in Holocaust literature. Some readers accused Kosiński of anti-Polonism; others argued 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.

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.

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, an industrial engineer who is an amateur historian, has claimed that Kosiński was a professional confabulator. In June 1982, a Village Voice article 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 article also claimed that Kosiński's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors," pointing to striking stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. New York poet George Reavey, embittered by his own lack of literary success, claimed to have been one of the editors who wrote The Painted Bird, though his assertions were ignored by the press. The article presented a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust — a view which was later supported by a Polish biographer, Joanna Siedlecka, and an American biographer, James Sloan. The article asserted that The Painted Bird, assumed by some to be semi-autobiographical, was a work of fiction. The article maintained that 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 autobiographical events.

Kosiński's defenders also assert that these assertions ignore the stylistic differences apparent in the work of almost any artist over a period of more than a few years.

Terence Blacker, an English publisher and author, wrote in 2002:

"The significant point about Jerzy Kosinski was that ... his books ... had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty's Reds. He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect. All in all, he was a perfect candidate for the snarling pack of literary hangers-on to turn on. There is something about a storyteller becoming rich and having a reasonably full private life that has a powerful potential to irritate so that, when things go wrong, it causes a very special kind of joy."

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. Ironically, it might have been his only true autobiographical novel about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud.

TV, film, and newspaper appearances

Kosiński appeared 12 times on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during 1971-73 and The Dick Cavett Show in 1974, played the role of Bolshevik revolutionary and Politburo member Grigory Zinoviev in Warren Beatty's film Reds, posed half-naked for a cover photograph by Annie Leibovitz for the New York Times Magazine in 1982, 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 and his usual rum-and-Coke, twisting a plastic shopping bag around his head and taping it shut around his neck (a method of suicide suggested by the Hemlock Society), 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 Albion College, Michigan.
• 1989 -- Received Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Humane Letters from 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). He was also invited by the dying Nobel Prize-winning French biochemist Jacques Monod to document his final hours.

Miscellaneous

• In 1975 Chuck Ross, a Los Angeles freelance writer conducted the Steps experiment by sending 21 pages of the book to four publishers. The book was turned down by all of them including Random House imprint: Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of three Kosinski’s novels. Ross reveals his findings in New West magazine four years later. His article includes Kosinski's advice that next time he should offer the entire text. Ross repeats his experiment by submitting the entire text of Steps to literary agents in 1981 under pseudonym Erik Demos, with equally dismal results.

Further reading

• Sepp L. Tiefenthaler, Jerzy Kosinski: Eine Einfuhrung in Sein Werk, 1980, ISBN 3416015568
• Norman Lavers, Jerzy Kosinski, 1982, ISBN 0805773525
• Byron L. Sherwin, Jerzy Kosinski: Literary Alarm Clock, 1982, ISBN 0941542009
• Barbara Ozieblo Rajkowska, Protagonista De Jerzy Kosinski: Personaje unico, 1986, ISBN 847496122X
• Paul R. Lilly, Jr., Words in Search of Victims: The Achievement of Jerzy Kosinski, Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1988, ISBN 0873383664
• Welch D. Everman, Jerzy Kosinski: the Literature of Violation, Borgo Press, 1991, ISBN 0893702765.
• Tom Teicholz, ed. Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, ISBN 0878056254
• Joanna Siedlecka, Czarny ptasior (The Black Bird), CIS, 1994, ISBN 8385458042.
• James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography, Diane Pub. Co., 1996, ISBN 0788153250.
• Agnieszka Salska, Marek Jedlinski, Jerzy Kosinski : Man and Work at the Crossroads of Cultures, 1997, ISBN 8371710879
• Barbara Tepa Lupack, ed. Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998, ISBN 0783800738

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