Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut in 1972
Born	Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-11-11)November 11, 1922 Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.
Died	April 11, 2007(2007-04-11) (aged 84) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, essayist
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Cornell University Carnegie Institute of Technology University of Tennessee University of Chicago (M.A.)
Period	1949–2007
Genre	Satire Gallows humor Science fiction
Notable works	Cat's Cradle Slaughterhouse-Five Breakfast of Champions
Spouse	Jane Marie Cox Jill Krementz
Children	Mark Vonnegut Edith Vonnegut Nannette Vonnegut James Adams (nephew, adopted) Steven Adams (nephew, adopted) Kurt Adams (nephew, adopted) Lily Vonnegut (adopted)
Relatives	Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. (father) Clemens Vonnegut, Sr. Bernard Vonnegut, Sr. Bernard Vonnegut
Military career
Allegiance	United States
Service/branch	United States Army
Years of service	1943-1945
Rank	Corporal
Unit	423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division
Battles/wars	World War II Battle of the Bulge
Awards	Purple Heart Prisoner of War Medal
Website
vonnegut.com

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (/ˈvɒnɨɡət/; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer.^[1] His works, such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973), blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen, he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a pacifist intellectual, who often was critical of the society that he lived in.^[2] He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.^[3]

The New York Times headline at the time of his death called him "the counterculture's novelist."^[4][5]

Life

Early years

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Edith (Lieber) Vonnegut and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr..^[6] Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, Sr., was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis firm.^[7] Vonnegut had an older brother, Bernard and a sister, Alice.^[8] Bernard, later an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation.^[9]

Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and went to Cornell University later that year. He majored in chemistry, and was assistant managing editor and associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun.^[10] He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father.

While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the United States Army during World War II.^[11] The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and later to the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.^[1] On Mother's Day 1944, while he was visiting his parents during a three day trip, he woke up to find that his mother had committed suicide with sleeping pills.^[12]

World War II

His experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. Reassigned to a combat unit due to the manpower needs of the Allied invasion of France, Vonnegut was captured while a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge. On December 19, 1944, the 106th Division was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out; we were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks."^[13] Imprisoned in Dresden, he was chosen as a leader of the prisoners of war because he spoke some German. After telling some German guards "what [he] was going to do to them when the Russians came," he was beaten and had his position as leader revoked.^[14] He witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, which destroyed most of the historic city.^[15]

Vonnegut was part of a group of American prisoners of war who survived the bombing in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used as an ad hoc detention facility. The German guards called the building Schlachthof Fünf ("Slaughterhouse Five"), and the POWs adopted that name. Vonnegut said that the aftermath of the attack on the defenseless city was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." The experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five—which is nominally a fictional work—he described the ruined city as resembling the surface of the moon. He said the German guards put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them.^[14] Vonnegut remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."^[16]

Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army soldiers in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border.^[14] He returned to the US and was awarded a Purple Heart on May 22, 1945 for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound."^[17][18] Later, writing facetiously in Timequake, he said that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite."^[19] His other decorations included the Army Good Conduct Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal (which is shown mounted with three bronze service stars in the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library), the Prisoner of War Medal, the World War II Victory Medal and the Combat Infantryman Badge. Vonnegut was discharged with the rank of Corporal.

Post-war career

After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology; he also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He described his work there: "Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time".^[20] Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student, with one professor remarking that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists, but he was not one of them. 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 nineteenth century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional".

In 1947 Vonnegut left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. Vonnegut was a technical writer, but he was also known for writing well past his typical work hours. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus, located within the town of Glenville, just across the Mohawk River from Schenectady. Vonnegut rented an upstairs apartment located along Alplaus Creek across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department, where he was an active volunteer firefighter for a few years. To this day, the apartment where Vonnegut lived for a brief time still has a desk at which he wrote many of his short stories. Vonnegut carved his name on its underside.

In the mid-1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse who had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence" and left.^[21] On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there in the early 1960s, his novel Cat's Cradle became a bestseller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five. The latter novel is considered one of the best American novels of the twentieth century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine,^[22] and the Modern Library.^[23]

Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod^[24] where, in 1957, he established one of the first Saab dealerships in the US. The business failed within a year.^[25][26]

Personal life

The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was billed simply as Kurt Vonnegut.

After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at his Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. That same year, Vonnegut began living with the woman who later would become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz.^[1] He did not divorce Cox until 1979. Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.

He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; three of his sister Alice's four children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer;^[27] and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, has written two books: one about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery; the other includes anecdotes of growing up when his father was a struggling writer, his subsequent illness and a more recent breakdown in 1985, as well as what life has been like since then. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.^[28]

His daughter Edith ("Edie"), an artist, was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. She has had her work published in a book entitled Domestic Goddesses and was once married to Geraldo Rivera.

His youngest biological daughter, Nanette ("Nanny"), was 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, during which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed in the Newark Bay rail crash on September 15, when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother—Kurt's sister Alice—died of cancer. In Slapstick, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice did. Her family had 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 died. The fourth and youngest of his sister's boys, Peter Nice, was an infant and went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama.

Adopted as an infant while Vonnegut was married to Jill Krementz, his daughter, Lily, became a singer, actress, and the producer of the YouTube series, "The Most Popular Girls in School".

Vonnegut's first wife Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky^[29] and she wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book, Angels Without Wings: A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy.^[30]

On November 11, 1999, an asteroid was named in Vonnegut's honor: 25399 Vonnegut.^[31]

A lifelong smoker, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he sardonically referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide".^[32]

Vonnegut taught at Harvard University, where he was a lecturer in English, and the City College of New York, where he was a distinguished professor.^[33]

Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, from head injuries suffered while falling down a flight of stairs in his home.^[1][34][35]

Writing career

Vonnegut's first published short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect",^[36] appeared in the February 11, 1950, edition of Collier's (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian work 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.^[37]

Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical 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 includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs, and an appearance by the author as a deus ex machina.

Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author, 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 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer written in a style similar to that of Vonnegut, was attributed to Kilgore Trout. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it. When the truth of its authorship was revealed, Vonnegut was reportedly "not amused". In an issue of The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received a very angry telephone call from Vonnegut about it.

Although many of his novels involved science fiction themes, they were read widely and reviewed outside the field, due in no small part to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, in his seminal short story, "Harrison Bergeron", egalitarianism is rigidly enforced by overbearing state authority, engendering horrific repression. In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through his character, the science fiction author Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon). His works are 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 as if they were 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. "Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein".^[34]

With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He was in his seventies. He continued to write for the magazine In These Times, where he was a senior editor,^[38] until his death in 2007. In that work he focused on subjects ranging from contemporary U.S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.^[39]

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?"^[16]

Vonnegut died the following year, on April 11, 2007, at the age of eighty-four.

The April 2008 issue of Playboy featured the first published excerpt from Armageddon in Retrospect, the initial posthumous collection of Vonnegut's work. The book was published in the same month. It included previously unpublished short stories and a letter that was written to his family during World War II when Vonnegut was a prisoner of war. The book also contains drawings by Vonnegut and a speech he wrote shortly before his death. Its introduction was written by his son, Mark Vonnegut. The second posthumous collection Look at the Birdie was published in 2009.

Art 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. Many Vonnegut works of art may be found in his novels and short story collections, such as Armageddon in Retrospect. Later in his career, he became more interested in art, particularly silk-screen prints,^[40] which he pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III. Vonnegut cited artists Paul Klee and Georges Braque as particular influences.^[41] According to his daughter Nanette, Vonnegut also was influenced by illustrators, Al Hirschfeld and Edward Gorey.^[42]

In October 1980, Vonnegut exhibited his drawings in pen, pencil, and colored felt-tipped markers at the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd. in New York.^[43][44][45] Fellow writers Norman Mailer and George Plimpton attended the opening of the Vonnegut exhibition,^[46] as did television personality and fellow artist, Morley Safer.^[47] Later, Vonnegut would remark, "I actually had a one-person show of drawings a few years back... in Greenwich Village, not because my pictures were any good but because people had heard of me".^[48] On the occasion of the show's opening, Vonnegut expressed his preference for using colored felt-tipped markers rather than oil paints or watercolor. "Oil is such a commitment", Vonnegut explained, whereas he found watercolors "too bland, too weak". He said, however, "they make such extraordinary Magic Markers, such brilliant colors. It makes things very easy". He also compared the creative process of drawing with that involved in writing. "If you make a mistake on a picture it's satisfying to wad it up and toss it out" he said. "When you have to do that with a written page, it's a more depressing failure."^[49] Whereas the writer is only satisfied upon the work's completion, Vonnegut said, "the act [of painting] itself is enjoyable".^[50] He further explained that "in a picture there may be 10 or 12 significant details. On a printed page there are 2,500".^[49] As to his art's significance, Vonnegut declared, "My drawings are as rare as exotic postage stamps."^[47]

In 2004, Vonnegut participated in the project The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, for which 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.

In May 2014, Vonnegut's daughter, Nanette Vonnegut, published a book of her father's drawings entitled Kurt Vonnegut Drawings through Monacelli Press, a division of Random House.^[51] In her introduction, Nanette discusses her father's preference for drawing to writing. She quotes him that "the making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza." ^[52] A book signing and an exhibition of original drawings by Vonnegut was held at the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd. in New York, the gallery where, in 1980, Vonnegut had shown his work. Attendees at the event continued the original guestbook from Vonnegut's 1980 solo show. The Wall Street Journal reported that, "if they flipped back a few pages, they could see the signatures of luminaries like George Plimpton, some of which were accompanied by personal messages to Mr. Vonnegut." Margo Feiden related to the Journal that "she was struck by Mr. Vonnegut after he told her that he thought of himself as a visual artist but had to work as an author to make a living." ^[53]

Politics

Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives, Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs, (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus and Eugene Debs Metzger in Deadeye Dick), as well as Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos).

Vonnegut was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was featured in a print advertisement for them.

In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[54]

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 referred to the controversial assisted suicide proponent, Jack Kevorkian.

With his columns for In These Times, he began an attack on the George W. Bush administration 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 These Times quoted Vonnegut as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."^[55][56]

In a 2003 interview Vonnegut said, "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or 'PPs.'"^[57] When asked how he was doing at the start of a 2003 interview, he replied: "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK."^[58]

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."^[59]

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian. During the course of the interview Nason brought up the subject of war asking Vonnegut, "Do you or did you bear any ill will towards your captors?" to which Vonnegut replied, "Not at all. And I regard anybody who is a soldier in any army that is at war as a brother of mine." When asked if he also regarded terrorists as soldiers, Vonnegut replied, "I regard them as very brave people, yes." When pressed further, Vonnegut said, referencing a line from Horace's Odes, "It is sweet and noble—sweet and honourable I guess it is—to die for what you believe in." Nason then asked Vonnegut, "But terrorists believe in twisted religious things, don't they? So surely that can't be right?", to which Vonnegut replied, "Well, they're 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."^[60]

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, 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."^[61]

A 2006 interview with Rolling Stone 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.'"^[16]

Although he was a dissident to the end, Vonnegut held a bleak view on the power of artists to affect change. "During the Vietnam War", he told an interviewer in 2003, "every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high".^[58]

Religion

Vonnegut was descended from a family of German freethinkers, who were skeptical of "conventional religious beliefs."^[62] His great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, had authored a freethought book entitled, Instruction in Morals, as well as an address for his own funeral in which he denied the existence of God, an afterlife, and Christian doctrines about sin and salvation. Kurt Vonnegut reproduced his great-grandfather's funeral address in his book Palm Sunday, and identified these freethought views as his "ancestral religion", declaring it a mystery as to how it was passed on to him.^[63]

Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic,^[63] freethinker,^[64] humanist,^[64] Unitarian Universalist,^[65] agnostic,^[63] and atheist.^[66] He disbelieved in the supernatural,^[63] considered religious doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash", and he believed people were motivated to join religions out of loneliness.^[67] He's quoted in Cat's Cradle for writing, "she was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing". ^[68]He rejected the divinity of Jesus,^[66] but was nevertheless an admirer of the Sermon on the Mount.^[69]

In 2003, he was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto.^[70] Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought,^[71] and advocated it in various writings, speeches, and interviews. His ties to organized humanism included membership as a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism.^[72] In 1992, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007.^[73] In a letter to AHA members, Vonnegut wrote: "I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."^[74]

Vonnegut was, at one time, a member of a Unitarian congregation.^[63][75] Palm Sunday reproduces a sermon he delivered to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, concerning William Ellery Channing, who was a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. In 1986, Vonnegut spoke to a gathering of Unitarian Universalists in Rochester, New York, and the text of his speech is reprinted in his book Fates Worse Than Death. Also reprinted in that book was a "mass" by Vonnegut, which was performed by a Unitarian Universalist choir in Buffalo, New York.^[76] Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to, when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars.^[64] Vonnegut's parents were married by a Unitarian minister, and his son had, at one time, aspired to become a Unitarian minister.^[63]

Self-assessment

In 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 Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that. He wrote an earlier version of writing tips that was even more straightforward and contained only seven rules (although it advised using Elements of Style for more in-depth advice).^[77]

In "The Sexual Revolution", Chapter 18 of his book Palm Sunday, 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:

• Player Piano: B
• The Sirens of Titan: A
• Mother Night: A
• Cat's Cradle: A-plus
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
• Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
• Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
• Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
• Breakfast of Champions: C
• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons: C
• Slapstick: D
• Jailbird: A
• Palm Sunday: C

Appearances

• Vonnegut held a cup of coffee and appeared on screen for approximately 1.5 seconds in a 1984 commercial sponsored by the National Coffee Association.^[78]
• Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in the 1986 film 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 is not Melon's own, Professor Turner tells him, "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
• Vonnegut also made brief cameos in the film adaptations of his novels Mother Night and Breakfast of Champions.
• Vonnegut appeared in the opening sequence of Showtime's 1991 anthology series, Kurt Vonnegut's Monkey House, based on his short stories.
• Vonnegut narrated and wrote the narrative of two oratorios with composer Dave Soldier, recorded by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra: A Soldier's Story, based on the execution of Private Eddie Slovik and Ice-9 Ballads, adapted from Cat's Cradle.
• Vonnegut recorded a number of first-person voice-overs for Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War, including one of a young soldier reflecting on a visit with a prostitute.
• Vonnegut appeared briefly in the 2005 dramatic documentary, The American Ruling Class, playing himself.
• Vonnegut appeared briefly in the 2005 Dutch release of the three-part BBC documentary, D-Day to Berlin: The allies' journey to victory, telling about his memories of the bombing of Dresden.
• Vonnegut was interviewed in August 2006 on the national weekly public radio program, The Infinite Mind, from inside the 3-D virtual on-line community, Second Life. The program made broadcast history as the first to be taped inside a virtual world,^[79] and it was the author's last face-to-face sit-down interview. The host was The Infinite Mind's John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio as the program was taped. Vonnegut's virtual interview was taped in front of a virtual audience of 100 people from around the world at the 16-acre (65,000 m²) virtual broadcast center created by producer Bill Lichtenstein and Lichtenstein Creative Media,^[80] which produces The Infinite Mind.
• Vonnegut was featured in the 2007 film, Never Down, and appeared in several scenes as Robert.
• Vonnegut appeared in a forty-minute conversation with Adrian Mitchell in a 1982 BBC Two TV program, together with a rebroadcast of a surrealistic NET drama based on his work.
• Vonnegut spoke briefly of Marilyn Monroe in 1985 or 86 at his brownstone in Greenwich Village in a 2013 biography of the actress.^[81]

Tributes, honors and awards

• In 1971, The University of Chicago (where he attended decades earlier as an anthropology student) accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him a master of arts degree.^[82][83]
• Vonnegut was honored posthumously at the annual Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library McFadden Memorial Lecture at Butler University in Indianapolis on April 27, 2007. His son Mark delivered a speech that the author wrote for the event, which was reported to be the last thing he wrote. It ends with this: "I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here."^[84]
• The satirical newspaper The Onion contained a tribute to Vonnegut soon after he died, with a reference to his work Slaughterhouse-Five stating that he shouldn't be referred to as dead "without checking Dresden for his younger self first."^[85]
• On November 11, 2007, Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver reintroduced Kurt's Mile High Malt to celebrate the anniversary of Vonnegut's birthday.^[86]
• When Vonnegut died, members of the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department in New York lowered the American flag to half staff, hung the funeral shroud, and rang a fire bell in accordance with the traditional 5-5-5 alarm used to honor fallen brothers. Vonnegut's name still appears on an old active firefighters roster, located next to a screen-print that he donated to the department.
• 2081, a 2009 film adaptation of Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron", is dedicated "To Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."
• The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana in 2011.
• On Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis, there is a 40 ft (12 m) mural of Vonnegut.
• A sort of anti-tribute appears in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Inferno, which is set in Dante's Hell. The protagonist, a version of Niven, encounters Vonnegut's tomb in the city of Dis; another character theorizes it is punishment for Vonnegut's satire of religion in several of his stories. Above the tomb is a green neon sign that blinks "SO IT GOES", a central refrain which appears in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Bibliography

Notes

References

• Failey, Majie Alford (2011). We Never Danced Cheek to Cheek: The Young Kurt Vonnegut in Indianapolis and Beyond. Hawthorne Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9841456-8-3.
• Farrell, Susan (August 2008), Critical Companion to Kurt Vonnegut: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Facts on File, ISBN 0-8160-6598-5 
• Leeds, Marc. (1995) The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium with a Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29230-2. (Second edition expected in 2015 by Random House/Delacorte.)
• Shields, Charles. (2011). And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-8693-5.
• Sumner, Gregory. (2011). Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels. Seven Stories Press. ISBN 978-1-60980-349-0.
• Tally, Robert T. (2011). Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography. London & New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4411-6445-2.
• Vonnegut, Nanette. (2014). Kurt Vonnegut Drawings, with an Essay by Peter Reed. The Monacelli Press. ISBN 978-1-58093-377-3.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kurt Vonnegut.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Kurt Vonnegut

• Vonnegut.com Kurt Vonnegut's official website
• The Kurt Vonnegut Society
• Kurt Vonnegut papers at the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington
• Mustard Gas and Roses: The Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington
• Vonnegut, Kurt at the Library of Congress
• Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is the nation's only library/museum dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut
• Works by Kurt Vonnegut at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Kurt Vonnegut at Internet Archive
• Works by Kurt Vonnegut at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Kurt Vonnegut at the Internet Movie Database
• Kurt Vonnegut & Stephen Banker, audio interview from 1978

Kurt Vonnegut Bibliography Novels Player Piano (1952) The Sirens of Titan (1959) Mother Night (1961) Cat's Cradle (1963) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Breakfast of Champions (1973) Slapstick (1976) Jailbird (1979) Deadeye Dick (1982) Galápagos (1985) Bluebeard (1987) Hocus Pocus (1990) Timequake (1997) Story collections Canary in a Cathouse (1961) Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) Bagombo Snuff Box (1999) God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999) Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) Look at the Birdie (2009) While Mortals Sleep (2011) Sucker's Portfolio (2013) Collected essays Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) Palm Sunday (1981) Fates Worse Than Death (1991) A Man Without a Country (2005) Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young (2013, speeches) Scripts Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) Between Time and Timbuktu (1972) Make Up Your Mind (1993) Miss Temptation (1993) L'Histoire du Soldat (1993) Adaptations Displaced Person (1958, 1985) Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) Between Time and Timbuktu (1972) Next Door (1975) Slapstick of Another Kind (1982) Who Am I This Time? (1982) Harrison Bergeron (1995) Mother Night (1996) Breakfast of Champions (1999) 2081 (2009) Characters and concepts Kilgore Trout Billy Pilgrim Eliot Rosewater Eugene Debs Hartke Rabo Karabekian RAMJAC Ilium Bokononism Granfalloon Ice-nine Related Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Fictional books invented by Kurt Vonnegut Art career Family Jill Krementz (second wife) Mark Vonnegut (son) Edith Vonnegut (daughter) Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. (father) Bernard Vonnegut (brother) Bernard Vonnegut, Sr. (grandfather) Commons Wikiquote Wikisource texts

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