Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography

James Park Sloan

ago 2020 · Crossroad Press

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He was hailed as one of the world’s great writers and intellectuals, with novels like The Painted Bird and Being There. He was acclaimed as a heroic survivor and witness of the Holocaust. He won high literary awards, made the bestseller lists, taught and lectured in prestigious universities, was feted in high society, and became an intimate of the rich and famous in a jet-set world of glitter and glamour. Then, in an expose that sent shock waves throughout the intellectual community, he was denounced as a C.I.A. tool, a supreme con man, and a literary fraud, igniting a firestorm of controversy that consumed his reputation and culminated in his headline-making suicide.

Now this compelling biography cuts to the complex heart of the truth about the man and the myth that was Jerzy Kosinski. In so doing, it unfolds a story of reality and deception as fascinating, as moving, as painfully honest, and as revelatory as the most gripping of novels.

With research that extends from the Poland of Kosinki’s birth and early life to scrupulous examinations of every allegation against Kosinski throughout his career, James Park Sloan, who knew Kosinski for twenty years before his death, leaves no stone unturned and no mask intact. The facts of Kosinski’s horrific childhood Holocaust experiences are sorted out from the fictions of The Painted Bird. Sloan traces Kosinski’s years as an emigre student at Columbia; his marriage to an alcoholic American millionairess; his first literary mark with anti-Communist writings; his award-winning novels and the controversy surrounding their authorship; his triumphant climb to success on an increasingly shaky stairway of half-truths; his compulsive sexual adventuring in New York's erotic underground; his relationship with such figures as Norman Mailer, Roman Polanski, Henry Kissinger, and others in the political and cultural limelight; and the Gotterdammerung of his life and reputation when an article in the Village Voice cast all he had done in doubt despite his denials and his circle’s support.

A dazzling investigation of the tantalizing mystery of an extraordinary man and the tangled roots of his artistry, enriched by frank and intimate testimonies of Kosinski’s widow, Kiki, his friends and lovers, his editors and “helpers”, his defenders and detractors, Jerzy Kosinski is intriguing biography, equal to its subject.