Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest of three children in a family of German-American descent ^[1]. His father, Kurt Vonnegut Sr., was an architect, and his mother, Edith Lieber, came from a wealthy brewing family. The Great Depression hit the household hard: architectural commissions dried up, the family sold its home, and Vonnegut was moved from private school to public education, a shift he later credited with shaping his egalitarian outlook ^[2].

At Shortridge High School he worked on the daily student newspaper, an unusual institution for an American high school at the time, and the experience gave him early training in writing quickly for a real audience ^[1]. In 1940 he enrolled at Cornell University, where his father and brother pushed him toward the sciences. He studied biochemistry without enthusiasm but thrived as a columnist and editor for the Cornell Daily Sun ^[2].

His academic record at Cornell was poor, and in 1943, with the United States at war, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. The following year brought a private catastrophe: his mother died of an overdose of sleeping pills on Mother's Day 1944, while Vonnegut was home on leave before shipping out to Europe ^[3]. Her death haunted his fiction, where suicide and family grief recur as themes.

Vonnegut served as a battalion scout with the 106th Infantry Division and was captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 ^[1]. He was transported to Dresden, a city then largely untouched by bombing, and put to work with other prisoners in a factory producing malt syrup. The prisoners were housed in a former slaughterhouse, in an underground meat locker designated Schlachthof Fünf, or Slaughterhouse Five ^[3].

On the night of February 13, 1945, and in the days that followed, Allied bombers destroyed Dresden with high explosives and incendiaries, creating a firestorm that killed roughly 25,000 people according to a 2010 commission of German historians ^[4]. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived in the meat locker beneath the slaughterhouse. Afterward the Germans put them to work excavating corpses from the ruins, a task Vonnegut described in later interviews and essays as the defining horror of his life ^[3].

He was repatriated in 1945, received the Purple Heart, and returned home to a country eager to move past the war. It took him more than two decades to find a way to write about what he had seen. Anyone asking who was Kurt Vonnegut before he became famous would find a traumatized veteran trying, like millions of others, to build an ordinary life ^[2].

In 1945 Vonnegut married his childhood friend Jane Marie Cox and enrolled in the University of Chicago's graduate program in anthropology. His thesis proposals were rejected, and he left without a degree, though the university awarded him a master's degree in 1971, accepting his novel Cat's Cradle in place of a thesis ^[1]. He worked briefly as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, then took a public relations job with General Electric in Schenectady, New York, where his brother Bernard worked as an atmospheric scientist ^[2].

The corporate research culture at GE supplied material for his first novel, Player Piano (1952), a satire of a mechanized society in which machines have displaced human workers ^[1]. Through the 1950s he supported his growing family by selling short stories to magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, a market that collapsed as television spread. He moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and took odd jobs, including teaching and running a Saab dealership, while continuing to write ^[3].

His novels of the early 1960s, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), and Cat's Cradle (1963), were published as paperback originals or in small printings and earned little money at first, but they built a devoted readership, especially among college students. Cat's Cradle, with its invented religion of Bokononism and its world-ending substance ice-nine, later became one of the most studied entries in any Kurt Vonnegut biography ^[2]. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater followed in 1965, and that year he began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his students included John Irving ^[3].

A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 allowed Vonnegut to return to Dresden, and the trip helped him finish the war novel he had struggled with for over twenty years. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade appeared in 1969, at the height of American debate over the Vietnam War ^[1]. Its hero, Billy Pilgrim, comes 'unstuck in time,' drifting between his capture in the Bulge, the Dresden firestorm, suburban life as an optometrist, and captivity in an alien zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. The fractured structure let Vonnegut approach an atrocity that resisted conventional narrative ^[4].

The novel reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list and made its author a national figure ^[3]. Critics debated whether his science fiction devices belonged in serious literature, but readers embraced the plain sentences, the dark jokes, and the refrain 'So it goes,' which follows every death in the book. Among Kurt Vonnegut achievements, none matched the cultural penetration of Slaughterhouse-Five, which the Modern Library later placed on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century ^[5].

The books that followed consolidated his standing. Breakfast of Champions (1973), illustrated with his own felt-tip drawings, was a bestseller. Later novels included Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), and Timequake (1997), which he announced as his final novel ^[1]. He also wrote for the stage and screen: his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June ran on Broadway in 1970, and his television work Between Time and Timbuktu aired in 1972 ^[2]. Essay collections such as Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974), Palm Sunday (1981), and the posthumously assembled volumes kept his voice in public circulation. He served for a time as president of PEN American Center and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters ^[3].

Vonnegut and Jane Cox had three children: Mark, Edith, and Nanette. In 1958 his sister Alice died of cancer within days of her husband's death in a commuter train crash, and the Vonneguts took in three of the couple's four young sons, doubling their household almost overnight ^[3]. Mark Vonnegut, who suffered a psychotic breakdown as a young man and later became a pediatrician, wrote about the family in his memoirs ^[2].

The marriage to Jane ended in the 1970s after Vonnegut moved to New York City. In 1979 he married the photographer Jill Krementz, and the couple adopted a daughter, Lily ^[1]. Vonnegut spoke and wrote openly about his depression, and in 1984 he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, an episode he discussed with characteristic bluntness in later essays ^[3].

He was a lifelong chain smoker of Pall Mall cigarettes and joked in print that he planned to sue the manufacturer because the packages promised to kill him and had failed to do so ^[3]. A self-described humanist and freethinker in a family tradition of German-American skepticism, he served as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, succeeding Isaac Asimov ^[6]. Among the more personal Kurt Vonnegut facts: he ran one of the earliest Saab dealerships in the United States and remained a proud, unashamed doodler whose asterisk self-portraits and drawings were exhibited in galleries ^[2].

After Timequake, Vonnegut declared himself finished with novels but kept writing essays and giving lectures. In his final years he contributed columns to the magazine In These Times, sharply attacking the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War ^[6]. Those pieces were gathered in A Man Without a Country (2005), a slim bestseller that introduced his voice to a new generation of readers ^[1].

In January 2000 a fire broke out in his Manhattan brownstone, and he was hospitalized for smoke inhalation ^[3]. He recovered and continued to appear in public, drawing large audiences at universities, where he delivered wry commencement-style talks about kindness, art, and the pleasures of ordinary errands.

On March 11, 2007, Vonnegut fell on the steps of his New York City home and suffered severe brain injuries. He died on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84 ^[1]. Obituaries around the world remembered him as a counterculture icon and one of the last widely shared literary voices in American life ^[3].

Vonnegut's reputation has held steady since his death, and his major novels have never gone out of print. Slaughterhouse-Five is a staple of high school and university syllabuses, and it also ranks among the books most frequently challenged or banned in American schools; a 1973 school board book burning in Drake, North Dakota, prompted one of Vonnegut's best-known letters in defense of free expression ^[3]. The novel's blend of witness and invention continues to shape how writers approach war ^[4].

His influence runs through American fiction and far beyond it. Writers including John Irving, who studied under him at Iowa, have acknowledged his example, and his aphorisms, especially 'So it goes' and the injunction from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater that 'you've got to be kind,' circulate constantly online ^[2]. Terms he coined, such as granfalloon and karass from Cat's Cradle, entered the wider vocabulary.

Institutions preserve the record. The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library opened in Indianapolis in 2011 and promotes literacy and free speech programs in his name ^[6]. His manuscripts are held at Indiana University's Lilly Library, and Charles J. Shields published the first full-length biography, And So It Goes, in 2011 ^[7]. The year 2007 was declared 'The Year of Vonnegut' in Indianapolis by the city's mayor, an honor announced shortly before his death. For readers who ask what made him matter, the answer his admirers usually give is simple: he wrote honestly about cruelty without ever giving up on decency ^[3].