1.  Jerzy Kosinski was born in 1933, in Lodz, Poland. 

2.  He was brought up in a well to do family setting. 

a. Mother was a pianist of professional caliber.

b. Father was philologist, working with different languages.

3.  In 1939, Kosinski was separated from his family during the Nazi invasion of Poland.

II. Political Jerzy
 

1. The most significant aspect of his life was the Holocaust, which he later describes in great detail in his novel The Painted Bird.

2. Grew up in a "collectivist society" as well as a "Stalanist".

3. He was educated in communist society and strongly opposed those beliefs.

4. World War II had taken its toll on all of Europe as well as Kosinski, since he was left a wandering nomad, and separated from his family.

5.  Due to his Marxist backround, Kosinki was turned down for many passports which he was trying to receive in order to escape the Communist rule.

6.  Kosinski was later granted a passport to the United States as a "highly skilled alien".

III.  Social Life of Kosinski in America 
 

1.  While living off of $2.80 for a while, he came across a wide variety of jobs: paint scraper, chauffer, and even a truck driver.

2. The Ford Foundation granted him a grant to do doctoral work at Columbia.

3. Co-classmate convinced him to write on his experiences in the Russian Collectivization which he later turned into his novel The Future is Ours Comrade, under the psydonym John Novak.
 

1. Kosinski's writing was aimed directly at eliminating our provincial "sensitivity".

2. Kosinski has attempted in several ways to invade the world of his novels with quotations from "real" life, as in Blind Date, creating extremely powerful scenes from the tension between fact and fiction.

3. Kosinski refuses to give us any moral guidelines, refuses to tell us which actions we should approve, which we should not.