The Painted Bird is a 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosiński that describes World War II as seen by a boy, considered a "Gypsy or Jewish stray," wandering about small villages scattered around an unspecified country in Central and Eastern Europe.

Jerzy Kosiński was a Polish-American writer and two-time president of the American Chapter of P.E.N., who wrote primarily in English. Born in Poland, he survived World War II as a Jewish man and, as a young man, emigrated to the U.S., where he became a citizen.