K osinski, J erzy

Abstract

For Polish‐born novelist Jerzy Kosinski, the thin line separating fact from fiction was never significant. Born of Jewish parents in 1933, Kosinski survived World War II, sheltered by Polish peasants. In 1957, he arrived in the United States, where he published two well‐received monographs on communist Russia and his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), deemed a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. Encouraged by initial success, Kosinski became a recognized writer whose works, praised for evocative representations of totalitarianism, collective mind, and victimization, were listed beside those of Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and Ken Kesey. His glittering career of an “eccentric but important writer‐thinker in the existentialist mode of Sartre and Camus” (Sloan 1996) was ruined in 1982, when two reporters from the Village Voice insinuated that his account of himself and his Holocaust experience was based on fiction rather than fact. In the wake of further publications portraying him as an impostor, plagiarist, and pathological liar, Kosinski's literary status rapidly deteriorated.