Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr |
| Born: |
November 11 1922(1922--)
Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Died: |
April 11 2007 (aged 84)
New York, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation: |
Novelist, Essayist |
| Nationality: |
United States |
| Writing period: |
1950-2005 |
| Genres: |
Literary fiction
Satire
Black comedy |
| Debut works: |
Player Piano |
| Influences: |
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, William March,
Mark Twain, George Orwell |
| Influenced: |
Douglas Adams[1], Bill Bryson, Paul Auster,
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Louis Sachar,
George Saunders |
| Website: |
vonnegut.com |
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11 1922 –
April 11 2007) (pronounced [ˈvɑ.nə.gət]) was an
American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science
fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions
(1973).[2]
Life
Early years
Kurt Vonnegut was born to fourth-generation German-American parents, son and grandson
of architects in the Indianapolis firm Vonnegut & Bohn. As a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,[3] Vonnegut worked on the nation's first daily high school
newspaper, The Daily Echo. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1942,
where he served as assistant managing editor and associate editor for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, and majored in biochemistry. While
attending Cornell, he was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, following in the
footsteps of his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The army sent him to the Carnegie Institute of
Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.[2] On May 14 1944, Mothers' Day, his mother, Edith Lieber
Vonnegut, committed suicide.[4]
World War II and the firebombing of Dresden
Photo of
Dresden shortly after the bombing
Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence
on his later work. As a colonel with the 106th Infantry
Division, Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion and wandered alone behind enemy lines for several days until captured by
Wehrmacht troops on December 14 1944.[5] Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut witnessed the February 13–February 14, 1945 bombing
of Dresden, which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of just seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to
survive, in their cell in an underground meat locker of a plant known as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). "Utter destruction", he recalled, "carnage unfathomable." The Germans put
him to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with
flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."[6] This experience formed the core of one of his
most famous works, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a theme in at least six other
books.[6]
Vonnegut was freed by Red Army troops in May 1945. Upon returning to America, he was awarded
a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound."[7]
Post-war career
After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate
student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the
similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work
in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. The University of
Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its
anthropological content and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.[8]
On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University
of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became
a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the
best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time
magazine[9] and the Modern Library.[10]
Early in his adult life, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod.[11]
Personal life
The author was known as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. until his father's death in October, 1957; after that he was known simply as Kurt
Vonnegut. Kurt is also the younger brother of Bernard Vonnegut, an atmospheric
scientist who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificial stimulation of rain.
He married his childhood sweetheart Jane Marie Cox, after returning from World War II, but the couple separated in 1970. He
did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer
Jill Krementz.[2] Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox
was finalized.
He had seven children: he shared three with his first wife, adopted his sister Alice's three children when she died of cancer,
and adopted another child, Lily. Two of these children have published books, including his only biological son, Mark Vonnegut, who wrote The Eden Express: A Memoir of
Insanity, about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery; the tendency to insanity he acknowledged may be partly hereditary,
influencing him to take up the study of medicine and orthomolecular
psychiatry. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom
Vonnegut considered an American saint, and to whom Kurt Vonnegut bore some resemblance in both literary style and physical
appearance.[12]
His daughter Edith Vonnegut ("Edie"), an artist, has also had her work published in a
book entitled Domestic Goddesses. Edith was once married to Geraldo Rivera. She
was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. His youngest daughter is Nanette ("Nanny"), named after Nanette Schnull,
Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior, and is the subject of several of his paintings,
notably "Nanny and Rose".
Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven and Kurt Adams; the
fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in
which their father was killed when his commuter train went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey, and their mother — Kurt's sister
Alice — died of cancer. In Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, Vonnegut recounts
that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself. Her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when
an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News, a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest
of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham,
Alabama as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress.
On January 31 2000, a fire destroyed the top story of his
home. Vonnegut suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized in critical condition for four days. He survived, but his personal
archives were destroyed. After leaving the hospital, he recuperated in Northampton,
Massachusetts.
Death
Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11 2007, in
Manhattan, New York after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks prior resulted in
irreversible brain injuries.[2][13][14]
Posthumous tributes
- The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his
honor.[15]
- At the annual Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library
McFadden Memorial Lecture at Butler University in
Indianapolis, on April 27 2007, where Vonnegut was being honored
posthumously, his son Mark delivered a speech that the author wrote for the event, and which was reported as the last thing he
wrote. It ends with: "I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here."[16]
- Following his death, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central gave Vonnegut a small tribute frame before the closing credits with his own famous phrase
on death "so it goes". There is also a short clip of him being interviewed by Jon Stewart,
in which he claims that gonorrhea, giraffes and
hippopotami are evidence of evolution being controlled by a divine power. This is also a
theme used in his print artwork. Confetti print #26 states "Evolution is so creative. That's how come we got giraffes and the
clap."
- At the end of the credits of Michael Moore's film Sicko, the words "Thank You Kurt Vonnegut for Everything" come up on the screen
Works
- See also: List of works by Kurt
Vonnegut
Writing career
Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect"
appeared in 1950 in Collier's. His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short
stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in
1959.[17] He attributes his unadorned writing style to his earlier reporting work.[citation needed] Through the 1960s the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle (which in 1971 earned him a master's degree) to the acclaimed, semiautobiographical
Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel
as a plot device.
These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions
(1973), which included many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an
appearance by the author himself, as a deus ex machina.
- "This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.
- "I know," I said.
- "You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.
- "I know," I said.
Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays.[18]
Breakfast of Champions became one of his best selling novels. It
includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author
Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.
In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine (a central wampeter in his novel Cat's Cradle), said to be a new form of ice with a different crystal structure from normal ice. When a
crystal of ice-nine is brought into contact with liquid water, it becomes a seed that
"teaches" the molecules of liquid water to arrange themselves into ice-nine. This process is not easily reversible, however, as
the melting point of ice-nine is 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit (45.8 degrees Celsius).
Metaphorically, ice-nine represents any potentially lethal invention created without regard for the consequences. Ice-nine is
patently dangerous, as even a small piece of it dropped in the ocean would cause all the earth's water to solidify. Yet it
was created, simply because human beings like to create and invent.
Although many of his novels involved science fiction themes, they were widely read
and reviewed outside the field, not least due to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, his seminal short story
Harrison Bergeron graphically demonstrates how an ethos like egalitarianism, when combined with too much authority, engenders horrific repression.
In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author
Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon), characterized by
wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism. In the foreword to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut
wrote that as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia, and it struck him that these
men walked like broken machines; it followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless
prisoners of determinism. Vonnegut also explored this theme in Slaughterhouse-Five,
in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim "has come unstuck in time" and has so little control over his own life that he cannot even
predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute. Vonnegut's well-known phrase "So it goes", used
ironically in reference to death, also originated in Slaughterhouse-Five and became a slogan for anti-Vietnam War
protestors in the 1960s. "Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein."[13]
With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his
retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine In These
Times, where he was a senior editor,[19] until
his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from President George W. Bush's
administration (for which he expressed contempt) to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In
2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would
be his last contribution to letters.[20]
His “trip to the post office” is a Vonnegut-style discourse on what is lost by a hermetically-isolated click of [send] on an
e-mail. In a Luddite mourning over the death of the typewriter, he describes - at chapter length - the process of sending pages
to his typist. How he first visits his local newsstand and stands in line, interacting and observing people, making conversation.
How he knows the newsstand has the exact envelope he needs, a large manila one with interesting ways of closing, including the
possibility of sensual mucilage to lick.
But also how the woman selling it to him has a jewel on her forehead that, he observes, makes the entire visit worthwhile. And
how he then takes the envelope to another woman in the post office with whom he is secretly in love (a secret to her, but not to
his wife) and adores because she does playful things with herself to amuse her customers, like the way she dresses and has fun
with her hair. He explains at length how he keeps himself hidden from her, with a professional poker-face. Without mentioning it
explicitly, he shows what he thinks we have perhaps lost with the instant convenience of e-mail.
An August 2006 article reported:
- He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today — or so he claims. "I've given up on it
... It won't happen. ... The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my
feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written
books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"[6]
Design career
Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for Slaughterhouse-Five and developed with
Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations, such as anal sphincters, and other less
indelicate images. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro
III.
More recently, Vonnegut participated in the project The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, where he created an
album cover for Phish called Hook, Line and Sinker, which has been included in a traveling
exhibition for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Beliefs
Politics
Vonnegut was a Humanist. He served as Honorary President of the
American Humanist Association, having replaced Isaac Asimov in what Vonnegut called "that totally functionless capacity". He was deeply influenced by
early socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quotes them
in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus) and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos).
He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and was
featured in a print advertisement for them.
Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his
retirement from fiction. (Although the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon
administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in Jailbird (1979),
would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the
administration.) His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.
With his columns for In These Times, he began a blistering attack on the
administration of President George W. Bush and the Iraq
war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and
dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I
never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." In "In These Times" he is also quoted
as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected." (http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/15_things_kurt_vonnegut_said). [21]
In A Man Without a Country, he wrote that "George W. Bush has gathered
around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism;
speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a
Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we
have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."[22]
In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The
Australian. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he
replied "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for
their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your
race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble — sweet and honourable I guess it is — to die for what you believe in."
(This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum est pro
patria mori" ["it is sweet and appropriate to die for your country"] from Horace's
Odes, or possibly to Wilfred Owen's ironic use of the line in his
Dulce Et Decorum Est.) David Nason took offense at Vonnegut's comments and
characterized him as an old man who "doesn't want to live any more ... and because he can't find anything worthwhile to keep him
alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing." Vonnegut's son, Mark Vonnegut, responded to the article by writing an
editorial to the Boston Globe in which he explained the reasons behind his
father's "provocative posturing" and stated that "If these commentators can so badly misunderstand and underestimate an utterly
unguarded English-speaking 83-year-old man with an extensive public record of saying exactly what he thinks, maybe we should
worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."[23]
A 2006 interview with Rolling Stone magazine stated, " ... it's not surprising
that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he
sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. 'Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,' Vonnegut laments. 'Bush is so
ignorant.' "[6]
Writing
On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a
short story:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the
reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get
pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such
complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat
the last few pages.
Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that the greatest American short story writer, Flannery O'Connor, broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.
In Chapter 18 of his book Palm Sunday "The Sexual Revolution," Vonnegut grades his own works. He states that the grades
"do not place me in literary history" and that he is comparing "myself with myself." The grades are as follows:
The last lines that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in his last book, go thus:
When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.''
Cameos
- Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in 1986's Back to School, in which he is hired by Rodney
Dangerfield's Thornton Melon to write a paper on the topic of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Recognizing the work as not
Melon's own, Professor Turner tells him, "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
- Vonnegut also makes brief cameos in the film adaptations of his novels Mother
Night and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night
was directed by Keith Gordon, who starred as Rodney Dangerfield's son in Back to
School.
- He made a guest appearance on the 2002 DVD released by 1 Giant Leap leading the
producers of the film to say "probably the most unbelievable result in our whole production was getting Kurt Vonnegut to agree
to an interview". In the film he states "music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of
magic and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference"
Pop culture references
- At the end of the 1998 film Can't Hardly Wait, the character Preston Myers
(Ethan Embry) is scheduled to attend a pre-college writing workshop with Vonnegut.
- In the 1999 film Varsity Blues, directed by Brian Robbins, the main character, Jonathan Moxon played by James Van
Der Beek, the backup quarterback, is on the sidelines secretly reading Slaughterhouse-5, the coach (Bud Kilmer played by Jon
Voight) later grabs the book and throws it away.
- There was a widely-circulated urban legend on the Internet that he gave a
commencement speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 in which he issued simple advice,
most notably advising students to "wear sunscreen." In fact, the commencement speaker at
MIT in 1997 was Kofi Annan and the supposed Vonnegut speech was an article published in the
Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997 by columnist Mary Schmich. This confusion may have resulted from a
statement Vonnegut made in 1999 in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, "I wish one and all long and happy lives, no matter what
may become of them afterwards. Use sunscreen! Don’t smoke cigarettes. Cigars, however, are good for you.... Firearms are also
good for you.... Gunpowder has zero fat and zero cholesterol. That goes for dumdums, too."
- In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This action caused some confusion among readers. For some time many assumed
that Vonnegut must have written it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused"; in an
issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction
Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an
angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.
- In December 2005, Norwegian rock band Madrugada released their album Live at Tralfamadore, referencing the fictional home planet of aliens from several novels by
Kurt Vonnegut
- The Canadian Band Born Ruffians have written a song named after Kurt Vonnegut to be released on their upcoming Album
Trivia
References and footnotes
- ^ Adams Dark Matter Interview
- ^ a b c d Smith, Dinitia (2007-04-12). Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught
the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84. The New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12. In print: Smith, Dinitia, "Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead
at 84", The New York Times, April 12 2007, p.1
- ^ Shortridge
High School Collection. Shortridge High School. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ Reed,
Peter (1999). "Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts". Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.
- ^ NNDB - [check date] (battle of the Bulge started on Dec. 16)Biography of Kurt Vonnegut
- ^ a b c d Brinkley, Douglas (2006-08-24). Vonnegut's Apocalypse. Rolling Stone. Retrieved on 2007-04-23.
- ^ Sarah Land Prakken: The Reader's Adviser: A Layman's Guide to
Literature, R. R. Bowker 1974, ISBN 0-83520781-1, p. 623; Arthur Salm: Novelist Kurt Vonnegut: So it goes, The San
Diego Union-Tribune 15 April 2007
- ^ Katz, Joe (April 13, 2007). Alumnus Vonnegut dead at 84. Chicago Maroon. Retrieved on 2007-04-17.
- ^ 100 Best
Novels: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Time Magazine. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ 100 Best Novels. Modern Library (July 20, 1998). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ Levitas, Mitchel (August 19
1968). A Slight Case of Candor. The New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ And The Twain Shall Meet. University of Wisconsin-Madison (November 21
1997). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ a b Feeney, Mark (2007-04-12). Counterculture author, icon Kurt Vonnegut Jr. dies at 84. The Boston Globe. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ Lloyd, Christopher (April 12
2007). Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84. Indianapolis Star. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ 25399 Vonnegut (1999 VN20). Jet Propulsion Labratory: California Institute of Technology.
Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ Herman, Steve. Vonnegut's Hometown Honors Late Author. Retrieved on 2007-04-28.
- ^ Stableford, Brian (1993). "Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.", in
John Clute & Peter Nicholls (eds.):
The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction, 2nd edition, Orbit,
London, p. 1289. ISBN 1-85723-124-4.
- ^ Kurt Vonnegut dies at
84: paper. Reuters (April 2 2007). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ NY1 Story April 12, 2007
- ^ Callahan, Rick. "Indianapolis honors literary native son", Delaware News-Journal (reprinting from the Associated Press), 14 January
2007. Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
- ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (May 10, 2004). Cold
Turkey. In these Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (October 29,
2004). The End is Near. In These Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ Vonnegut, Mark (December 27,
2005). Twisting Vonnegut's views on terrorism. The Boston Globe. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ I smoke, therefore I am. The Guardian Observer (February
5, 2006). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (November 24,
2004). Have I Got a Car for You!. In These Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
External links
Databases
