When Jerzy Kosinski's novel The Painted Bird was published on 15 October 1965, The New York Times editors assigned the review to Elie Wiesel, the best-known Holocaust writer in America. Wiesel was impressed by The Painted Bird and wrote that the...

Jerzy N. Kosinski, novelist and essayist, was born on 14 June 1933 in Lodz, Poland, the son of Russian parents Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta. At the age of six, he was separated from his parents and wandered throughout Poland and Russia, continually...

Polish-born popular American author of two sociological studies and nine novels, survivor of the Holocaust, husband of the heiress to the U.S. Steel fortune, avid sportsman, college lecturer, sex club connoisseur—Jerzy Kosinski lived a life as...

Jerzy Kosinski's novels lie in the area between the post-war European emotional lucidity and the hip coolness of American mid-generation. His is a non-judgmental, morally permissive fiction, in which action is meant not as salvation, but as making the most of life. In Kosinski's novels, man does not have a character by which he is doomed; he adjusts himself to reality by denying his civilized self and his moral judgment. He forms a personality-free character in a personality-free world. Kosins...

Jerzy Kosinski's second novel, Steps (1968), is made up of a series of vignettes set in Poland during and after WWII, and in "the West." Always the setting is exotic; always we sense, in Thoreau's phrase, that we are immersed "in dreams awake." The protagonist-narrator of Steps is alternately the dark-complected boy of Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), and that same boy as an adult. He is variously a waif, soldier, photographer, waiter, day lab...

I have been mulling over the sense of dreariness [Kosinski] provokes—a dreariness quite separate from that conjured up by his venomous outlook on life. He presents a brutal, anarchic world, where only the man who takes things into his own hands is commendable. His famous flat tone has been interpreted as an emblem of the flatness of modern life. The trouble is that the symbolism fails; the books refuse to produce the overtones that dozens of reviewers (and the author) have hopefully and earnestly sou...