Kosinski, Jerzy

(US, 1933–91)

Kosinski arrived in New York from Poland as a young man, and his semi-autobiographical novel The Painted Bird (1965) was an instant success. It concerns the fate of a boy on the run among East European peasantry during the Holocaust years; despite terrible traumas, told with compelling inventiveness, the boy survives. Kosinski's most successful other novel is Being There (1970), a fable about a gardener whose simple-minded sayings are taken as brilliant insights by the American social and political world; it was made into a film in 1979 by Hal Ashby.

Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey  SV