Jerzy Kosinski

The Painted Bird is a controversial 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosinski which describes the world as seen by a young black-haired, black-eyed boy who wanders about small towns scattered around Central or Eastern Europe (presumably Poland) during World War II. ?For years Kosinski passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own experience during the Holocaust,? wrote D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. ?Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Kosinski confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences.?