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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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  • Born: 11 November 1922
  • Birthplace: Indianapolis, Indiana
  • Died: 11 April 2007 (injuries from a fall)
  • Best Known As: The author of Slaughterhouse-Five

A modern-day Mark Twain, right down to the bushy mustache and black humor, Kurt Vonnegut wrote dozens of satirical novels whose central theme is life's cosmic joke on humanity. Vonnegut was often called a science fiction author, but it's well known that he used the cloak of sci-fi simply as a means to deliver his cranky-but-funny deliberations on the human condition. His best-known books include Cat's Cradle (1963), Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Slapstick (1976). Many of his books featured a character named Kilgore Trout, a fictional author who is something of an alter-ego for Vonnegut himself. Vonnegut was the unwitting subject of a famous Internet hoax in 1997: a list of whimsical advice for college graduates was widely circulated via e-mail, identified as the text of a Vonnegut commencement address at MIT. In truth, Vonnegut had no connection with the essay, which was written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s father was also named Kurt... Venus on the Half-Shell, a real-life 1975 novel "by" Kilgore Trout, was written not by Vonnegut but by Philip Jose Farmer.

 
 
Biography: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007) is acknowledged as a major voice in American literature and applauded for his pungent satirical depictions of modern society. Emphasizing the comic absurdity of the human condition, he frequently depicted characters who search for meaning and order in an inherently meaningless and disorderly universe.

Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of a successful architect. After attending Cornell University, where he majored in chemistry and biology, he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the Second World War and eventually being taken prisoner by the German Army. Following the war, Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and subsequently moved to Schenectady, New York, to work as a publicist for the General Electric Corporation. During this period, he also began submitting short stories to various journals, and in 1951, he resigned his position at General Electric to devote his time solely to writing.

Vonnegut published several novels throughout the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with Player Piano in 1952. However, his frequent use of elements of fantasy resulted in his classification as a writer of science fiction, a genre not widely accepted as "serious literature," and his work did not attract significant popular or critical interest until the mid-1960s, when increasing disillusionment with American society led to widespread admiration for his forthright, irreverent satires. His reputation was greatly enhanced in 1969 with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, a vehemently antiwar novel that appeared during the peak of protest against American involvement in Vietnam. During the 1970s and 1980s, Vonnegut continued to serve as an important commentator on American society, publishing a series of novels in which he focused on topics ranging from political corruption to environmental pollution. In recent years, Vonnegut has also become a prominent and vocal critic of censorship and militarism in the United States.

Although many critics attribute Vonnegut's classification as a science-fiction writer to a complete misunderstanding of his aims, the element of fantasy is nevertheless one of the most notable features of his early works. PlayerPiano depicts a fictional city called Ilium in which the people have relinquished control of their lives to a computer humorously named EPICAC, after a substance that induces vomiting, while the The Sirens of Titan (1959) takes place on several different planets, including a thoroughly militarized Mars, where the inhabitants are electronically controlled. The fantastic settings of these works serve primarily as a metaphor for modern society, which Vonnegut views as absurd to the point of being surreal, and as a backdrop for Vonnegut's central focus: the hapless human beings who inhabit these bizarre worlds who struggle with both their environments and themselves. For example, in Player Piano, the protagonist, Dr. Paul Proteus, rebels against the emotional vapidity of his society, wherein, freed from the need to perform any meaningful work, the citizens have lost their sense of dignity and purpose. Proteus joins a subversive organization devoted to toppling the computer-run government and participates in an abortive rebellion. Although he is imprisoned at the end of the novel, Vonnegut suggests that Proteus has triumphed in regaining his humanity.

Vonnegut once again focuses on the role of technology in human society in Cat's Cradle (1963), widely considered one of his best works. The novel recounts the discovery of a form of ice, called ice-nine, which is solid at a much lower temperature than normal ice and is capable of solidifying all water on Earth. Ice-nine serves as a symbol of the enormous destructive potential of technology, particularly when developed or used without regard for the welfare of humanity. In contrast to what he considers the harmful truths represented by scientific discoveries, Vonnegut presents a religion called Bokononism, based on the concept that there are no absolute truths, that human life is ultimately meaningless, and that the most helpful religion would therefore preach benign lies that encourage kindness, give humanity a sense of dignity, and allow people to view their absurd condition with humor. The motif of the cat's cradle, a children's game played by looping string about the hands in a complex pattern, is used by Vonnegut to demonstrate the harm caused by the erroneous paradigms presented by traditional religions: "No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look at all those X's … no damn cat, and no damn cradle. "

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (1965), Vonnegut presents one of his most endearing protagonists in the figure of Eliot Rosewater, a philanthropic but ineffectual man who attempts to use his inherited fortune for the betterment of humanity. Rosewater finds that his generosity, his genuine concern for human beings, and his attempts to establish loving relationships are viewed as madness in a society that values only money. The novel includes traditional religions in its denunciation of materialism and greed in the modern world, suggesting that the wealthy and powerful invented the concept of divine ordination to justify and maintain their exploitation of others.

Vonnegut described Slaughterhouse-Five as a novel he was compelled to write, since it is based on one of the most extraordinary and significant events of his life. During the time he was a prisoner of the German Army, Vonnegut witnessed the Allied bombing of Dresden, which destroyed the city and killed more than 135,000 people. One of the few to survive, Vonnegut was ordered by his captors to aid in the grisly task of digging bodies from the rubble and destroying them in huge bonfires. Although the attack claimed more lives than the bombing of Hiroshima and was directed at a target of no apparent military importance, it attracted little attention, and Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut's attempt to both document and denounce this event. Like Vonnegut, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, named Billy Pilgrim, has been present at the bombing of Dresden and has been profoundly affected by the experience. His feelings manifest themselves in a spiritual malaise that culminates in a nervous breakdown. In addition, he suffers from a peculiar condition, that of being "unstuck in time," meaning that he randomly experiences events from his past, present, and future. The novel is therefore a complex, nonchronological narrative in which images of suffering and loss prevail. Charles B. Harris has noted: "Ultimately, [Slaughterhouse-Five] is less about Dresden than it is about the impact of Dresden on one man's sensibilities. More specifically, it is the story of Vonnegut's story of Dresden, how he came to write it and, implicitly, why he wrote it as he did."

In the works written after Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut often focuses on the problems of contemporary society in a direct manner. Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday (1973) and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976), for example, examine the widespread feelings of despair and loneliness that result from the loss of traditional culture in the United States; Jailbird (1979) recounts the story of a fictitious participant in the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration, creating an indictment of the American political system; Galapagos (1985) predicts the dire consequences of environmental pollution; and Hocus-Pocus; or, What's the Hurry, Son? (1990) deals with the implications and aftermath of the war in Vietnam. In the 1990s, he also published Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and Timequake (1997). Although many of these works are highly regarded, critics frequently argue that in his later works Vonnegut tends to reiterate themes presented more compellingly in earlier works. Many also suggest that Vonnegut's narrative style, which includes the frequent repetition of distinctive phrases, the use of colloquialisms, and a digressive manner, becomes formulaic in some of his later works.

Nevertheless, Vonnegut remains one of the most esteemed American satirists. Noted for their frank and insightful social criticism as well as their innovative style, his works present an idiosyncratic yet compelling vision of modern life.

Further Reading

Authors in the News, volume 1, Gale, 1976.

Bellamy, Joe David, editor, The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, University of Illinois Press, 1974.

Bryant, Jerry H., The Open Decision, Free Press, 1970.

Chernuchin, Michael, editor, Vonnegut Talks!, Pylon, 1977.

Clareson, Thomas D., editor, Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, volume 1, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Broadening Views, 1968-1988, Gale, 1989.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, volume 1, 1973; volume 2, 1974; volume 3, 1975; volume 4, 1975; volume 5, 1976; volume 8, 1978; volume 12, 1980; volume 22, 1982; volume 40, 1986; volume 60, 1991.

 

(born Nov. 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Ind., U.S. — died April 11, 2007, New York, N.Y.) U.S. novelist. He attended Cornell University and the University of Chicago. Captured by the Germans during World War II, he also survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden, an experience he made part of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; film, 1972). His pessimistic and satirical novels use fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization. They include Player Piano (1952), Cat's Cradle (1963), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Galápagos (1985), and Timequake (1997). A Man Without a Country (2005) is a collection of essays and speeches. Vonnegut also wrote plays and short stories.

For more information on Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.
(vŏn'əgət) 1922–2007, American novelist, b. Indianapolis. After serving in a World War II combat unit, he worked as a police reporter. Marked by wry black humor, Vonnegut's satirical, pessimistic, and morally urgent novels frequently protest the horrors of the 20th cent., as in the best-selling, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; film, 1972). His fiction spoke with particular forcefulness to the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 70s. Vonnegut's books frequently include elements of science fiction, featuring fantastic plots and sometimes involving such devices as trips in outer space, time faults, and apocalyptic destruction. Among his other novels are Player Piano (1952), Mother Night (1961; film, 1996), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Breakfast of Champions (1973; film, 1999), Deadeye Dick (1983), Bluebeard (1987), and the novel-memoir Timequake (1997). He also wrote short stories, plays, and essays, e.g., the collections Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) and The Man without a Country (2005).

Bibliography

See his semiautobiographical Fates Worse than Death (1991); W. R. Allen, ed., Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (1988); P. J. Reed and M. Leeds, Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays (1996); studies by S. Schatt (1976), J. Lundquist (1977), R. Merrill, ed. (1990), W. R. Allen (1991), L. Mustazza (1990 and 1994), P. J. Reed (1972 and 1997), H. Bloom, ed. (2000), K. A. Boon, ed. (2001), T. F. Marvin (2002), D. E. Morse (1992 and 2003), J. Klinkowitz (1982 and 2004), J. Tomedi (2004), and T. F. Davis (2006); M. Leeds, The Vonnegut Encyclopedia (1995).

 
Works: Works by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
(b. 1922)

1952Player Piano. Vonnegut's first novel converts the author's experience working in public relations for General Electric from 1947 to 1951 into a futuristic fantasy in which managers and engineers run a machine world. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, served in the army, and witnessed the firebombing of Dresden during the war.
1959The Sirens of Titan. Written for the paperback science fiction market, Vonnegut's second novel tells the story of playboy millionaire Malachi Constant, who becomes a space traveler, experiencing different societies on various planets. Called by critic Peter Reed "Existential Science Fiction," the novel follows science fiction formula more than any other of Vonnegut's novels but also addresses his characteristic theme of the struggle of the individual in the face of the absurdity of existence. Many regard the book as Vonnegut's finest.
1961Mother Night. Vonnegut's third novel uses first-person narration and the author himself as a character to offer commentary on an American playwright who spies in Nazi Germany, under cover as a pro-Nazi propagandist. Characteristically, Vonnegut is concerned with the ambiguous role of the artist. "We are what we pretend to be," Vonnegut would declare in his introduction to the 1966 edition, "so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
1963Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut's black comedy deals with the destructive capacity of technology as shown by the invention of "ice-nine," a substance capable of freezing all the water on earth. Vonnegut contrasts science with a religion called Bokononism, based on the ultimate absurdity of life.
1965God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Responding to his motto, "God damn it, you've got to be kind," a shell-shocked philanthropist tries to use his inherited fortune to better humankind in this satirical novel about how money-obsessed society views altruism as madness.
1968Welcome to the Monkey House. In the revision of his earlier book, Canary in a Cathouse (1962), Vonnegut collects stories and sketches written between 1950 and 1968.
1969Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Billy Pilgrim is a shell-shocked prisoner of war in Germany who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden while also "time-tripping" to the distant planet of Tralfamadore, where he is put in a zoo and mated with a movie star. Blending dark comedy, farce, and philosophical speculation, the novel is widely considered Vonnegut's masterpiece.
1970Happy Birthday, Wanda June. Vonnegut imagines the afterlife of two American military men who dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki. He would write the screenplay for the 1971 film version.
1973Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! The novel marks Vonnegut's return to fiction after several years of experimenting with other forms. It is also a return to Tralfamadore, the comic-fictitious planet he had created in Slaughterhouse Five (1969) as a metaphor for the arbitrariness of human existence.
1976Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More! Vonnegut's absurdist fantasy shows a former U.S. president who suffers from Tourette's syndrome and lives on the Island of Death with his twin sister.
1979Jailbird. Vonnegut covers the Watergate scandal in this satirical novel about a fictional conspirator trying to rebuild his life.
1981Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. This collection of Vonnegut's speeches, letters, short fiction, and reminiscences forms a kind of record of his life and imagination. Critics admire the way Vonnegut expresses his opinions with humor, in contrast with the usual pomposity that characterizes many such collections.
1982Deadeye Dick. Rudy Waltz, known as "Deadeye Dick" for accidentally shooting a pregnant woman, writes his memoirs, detailing other deaths and the explosion of a neutron bomb in Midland, Ohio. Vonnegut's novel expresses his persistent theme of finding ways to cope with the accidental, irrational, and the fatal.
1985Galapagos. Vonnegut turns to the world of a million years ago and the creation of the human race. This witty commentary on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution (the novel includes a cruise to the Galapagos Islands) weaves a fantasy that defies chronology, shifting from the past to the future and back again. It presents fascinating alternative views of humanity's origin.
1987Bluebeard. Vonnegut brings back the painter Rabo Karabekian from Breakfast of Champions (1973) in this meditation on art and war, as Rabo composes both his autobiography and his daily diary.
1990Hocus Pocus. Vonnegut treats the legacy of the Vietnam War from the perspective of Eugene Debs Hartke, reputedly the last American out of Vietnam.
1997Timequake. The writer's self-proclaimed final novel depicts a disruption in the space-time continuum, which forces everyone on earth to relive the 1990s and presents Vonnegut's valediction on the state of Western civilization at the close of the twentieth century. Critics note the author's "familiar tone of weary bemusement," and reviewer Brad Stone calls the book Vonnegut's "funniest since Breakfast of Champions." Bagombo Snuff Box, a collection of short fiction, would follow in 1999.

 
Quotes By: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Quotes:

"Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing."

"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people."

"We are what we imagine ourselves to be."

"I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival."

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

"The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth."

See more famous quotes by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 
Wikipedia: Kurt Vonnegut
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 1922April 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
Enlarge
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 13February 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:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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

  1. ^ Adams Dark Matter Interview
  2. ^ 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
  3. ^ Shortridge High School Collection. Shortridge High School. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  4. ^ Reed, Peter (1999). "Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts". Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida. 
  5. ^ NNDB - [check date] (battle of the Bulge started on Dec. 16)Biography of Kurt Vonnegut
  6. ^ a b c d Brinkley, Douglas (2006-08-24). Vonnegut's Apocalypse. Rolling Stone. Retrieved on 2007-04-23.
  7. ^ 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
  8. ^ Katz, Joe (April 13, 2007). Alumnus Vonnegut dead at 84. Chicago Maroon. Retrieved on 2007-04-17.
  9. ^ 100 Best Novels: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Time Magazine. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  10. ^ 100 Best Novels. Modern Library (July 20, 1998). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  11. ^ Levitas, Mitchel (August 19 1968). A Slight Case of Candor. The New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  12. ^ And The Twain Shall Meet. University of Wisconsin-Madison (November 21 1997). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  13. ^ a b Feeney, Mark (2007-04-12). Counterculture author, icon Kurt Vonnegut Jr. dies at 84. The Boston Globe. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  14. ^ Lloyd, Christopher (April 12 2007). Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84. Indianapolis Star. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  15. ^ 25399 Vonnegut (1999 VN20). Jet Propulsion Labratory: California Institute of Technology. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  16. ^ Herman, Steve. Vonnegut's Hometown Honors Late Author. Retrieved on 2007-04-28.
  17. ^ 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. 
  18. ^ Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84: paper. Reuters (April 2 2007). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  19. ^ NY1 Story April 12, 2007
  20. ^ Callahan, Rick. "Indianapolis honors literary native son", Delaware News-Journal (reprinting from the Associated Press), 14 January 2007. Retrieved on 2007-01-15. 
  21. ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (May 10, 2004). Cold Turkey. In these Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  22. ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (October 29, 2004). The End is Near. In These Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  23. ^ Vonnegut, Mark (December 27, 2005). Twisting Vonnegut's views on terrorism. The Boston Globe. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  24. ^ I smoke, therefore I am. The Guardian Observer (February 5, 2006). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
  25. ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (November 24, 2004). Have I Got a Car for You!. In These Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.

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