Jerzy Kosinski was born in Poland in 1933 to Russian parents who had fled the revolution. He was separated from his family when the Nazis invaded in 1939. For six years he wandered form village to village scorned by East European gypsies who feared his hawk like face and penetrating eyes. He survived German terror by his wits and he was struck dumb from the shock that he underwent from this six-year period of wandering. He was mute from age nine to fourteen.(New Yorker) Kosinski was later reunited with his family and by the time he was twenty-four, he attained a professorship at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Soon after Kosinski got his job as a professor, he went to America. Within four months of Kosiski s arrival in America, he spoke fluent English and moved on to Columbia University. He soon had a great novelist career. He was earning national awards, was married to a millionaire socialite, was earning huge sums of money for his books and screenplay, and played a small part in a movie. He was truly living the American dream. (Times Mirror Co.) Kosinski s suicide in 1991 at age fifty-eight shocked the outside world, but didnt surprise many of his friends. Ever since Kosinski had come to the U.S in 1957, he had become known for his spectrum of sociopathic behavior ranging from mere megalomania to brutal sexual coercion, fraud, and plagiarism. Kosinski was a pathological liar and a control freak. Some say he couldnt help his lying because any Jew who lived through the Holocaust had to lie to live. It was in Nazi, Poland that Kosinski became an expert storyteller. (JK; pg. 97) Kosinski s third novel, Being There, is about a mentally retarded middle aged man named Chance. Chance has always lived in a townhouse where he tended the garden. The only thing he did except tend to the garden, was watch television. A cook named Louis prepared his meals. When the old man who ran the townhouse died, Chance was expelled...
