Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosiński was a Polish-American novelist who wrote primarily in English. He was born in 1933 in Łódź, Poland, to Jewish parents. As a child during World War II, he lived in central Poland under a false identity, Jerzy Kosiński, which his father gave to him. He survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who offered assistance to Polish Jews, often at great risk. He also received a forged baptismal certificate from a Catholic priest, and attended church in nearby villages. After the war, he moved to Jelenia Góra with his parents, and earned graduate degrees in history and sociology at the University of Łódź. He also studied in the Soviet Union, and served as a sharpshooter in the Polish Army. He emigrated to the United States in 1957, using fake documents and a fake foundation that supposedly sponsored him. He became an American citizen in 1965. He received grants from the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Ford Foundation, which allowed him to write a political non-fiction book that opened new doors of opportunity. He became a lecturer at Yale, Princeton, Davenport, and Wesleyan universities. He also practiced the photographic arts, with one-man exhibitions in Warsaw and New York. He was known for various novels, among them The Painted Bird (1965), which was a controversial and graphic account of his wartime experiences, and Being There (1971), which was a satirical novel about a simple-minded gardener who becomes a political celebrity. Both novels were adapted into films, in 2019 and 1979 respectively. He also wrote Steps (1968), which won the National Book Award for Fiction, and several other novels, such as Cockpit (1975), Blind Date (1977), Passion Play (1979), Pinball (1982), and The Hermit of 69th Street (1988). He also wrote essays, such as Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962-1991 (1992), and Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski (1993), which was published posthumously. He was a two-time president of the American Chapter of P.E.N., an international association of writers. He was married twice, first to Mary Hayward Weir, an heiress of the American Steel and Wire fortune, and later to Katherina "Kiki" von Fraunhofer, a German aristocrat. He had no children. He suffered from multiple illnesses and chronic pain, and was accused of plagiarism and fabrication by some critics and journalists. He committed suicide by suffocation in 1991 in New York City, at the age of 57. He left a note that said: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity."