In the following essay, Corry traces Kosinski's life and career, calling The Painted Bird "the making of Jerzy Kosinski, just as it was his undoing."

When I heard that Jerzy Kosinski had killed himself, I was furious and then I cried, a not uncommon reaction, I suspect, among so many people who knew him. "I'm about to put myself to sleep," he said in a note to Kiki, his wife, and then lowered himself into a bathtub half-filled with water, tied a plastic shopping bag around his head, and died. What a whole gallery of twentieth-century thugs had been unable to do to Jerzy, Jerzy had done to himself. The author of The Painted Bird, Steps, Being There, and eight other books, was dead at 57. Jerzy, I thought, how could you?

Well, he could because he believed it was the correct thing to do. Jerzy was his...