The Painted Bird

Name: The Painted Bird
ISBN: 9780802134226

Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosinski's mythic, master-work of a shattered post-War Europe.

A young boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, wanders alone from one village to another in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Kosinski's story follows a dark-haired, olive-skinned boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, as he wanders alone from one village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for. Through the juxtaposition of adolescence and the most brutal of adult experiences, Kosinski sums up a Bosch-like world of harrowing excess where senseless violence and untempered hatred are the norm. Through sparse prose and vivid imagery, Kosinski's novel is a story of mythic proportion, even more relevant to today's society than it was upon its original publication.

"One of the best. . . . Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity." —Elie Wiesel, The New York Times Book Review

"A powerful blow on the mind because it is so carefully kept within the margins of probability and fact." —Arthur Miller

"Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will be unmoved by it. The Painted Bird enriches our literature and our lives." —Jonathan Yardley, The Miami Herald

"Extraordinary . . . literally staggering . . . one of the most powerful books I have ever read." —Richard Kluger, Harper's Magazine

About the Author

Jerzy Kosinski (1933–1991) was a Polish-born American novelist whose stark, unsettling fiction made him one of the most talked-about literary figures of the postwar era. Born Józef Lewinkopf in Łódź, Poland, he spent much of his childhood in hiding during the Nazi occupation, an experience that shaped the bleak moral landscape of his work. After the war he studied in Poland and worked as a researcher before emigrating to the United States in 1957.

He made his name with The Painted Bird (1965), a harrowing account of a young boy’s wanderings through wartime Eastern Europe. The book was praised for its unflinching intensity and criticized for its brutality, and it sparked lasting debate about the line between memoir and fiction. His follow-up, Steps (1968), won the National Book Award for Fiction.

Kosinski’s best-known later work, Being There (1971), is a satirical tale of Chance, a simple-minded gardener mistaken for a sage. He adapted it for the 1979 film starring Peter Sellers, earning a Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay. His other novels include The Devil Tree, Cockpit, Blind Date, and Pinball.

His career was shadowed by controversy over questions of authorship and the autobiographical claims surrounding his writing. He died in New York City in 1991, leaving behind a body of work still read for its precise prose and its dark vision of power, survival, and identity.