Kurt Vonnegut

The Vonneguts were German-American gentry in Indianapolis: a great-grandfather with a hardware company, a father and grandfather who were architects, a mother whose family money came from beer. Prohibition closed the brewery in 1921 and the Depression closed the commissions. His brother and sister had been privately schooled and Kurt went to Public School No. 43. His father retreated into what Kurt called dreamy artistry. His mother turned bitter and abusive, and tried without success to sell short stories to the magazines. Anti-German feeling after the first war had already persuaded his parents not to teach him the language or anything else of the culture, which left him, he said, ignorant and rootless. He credited the family cook, Ida Young, with the moral instruction he actually received.

He was captured in the Battle of the Bulge on December 22, 1944, shipped toward Dresden in a boxcar the RAF mistakenly strafed on the way, and put to work in a factory making malt syrup for pregnant women. On February 13, 1945, the British and American air forces began burning the city. He waited it out in a meat locker three stories down, came up to find the place gone, and was set to digging bodies out of the rubble, which he called a terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt. It took him 23 years to get it onto paper. Slaughterhouse-Five went straight to the top of the bestseller list in 1969. Fourteen novels in all, plus three story collections, five plays and five books of nonfiction.

On May 14, 1944, home on leave for Mother's Day weekend, he found that his mother had killed herself with sleeping pills the night before. In 1958 his sister Alice died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train wreck, and the Vonneguts took in three of the orphaned boys. That made six children in a house with no financially successful novel in it. He opened a Saab dealership on Cape Cod in 1957 and it went bankrupt inside the year. He designed a war board game and no publisher wanted it. He smoked Pall Malls from about the age of 12 and said he intended to sue the company for false advertising, because it had promised on the package to kill him. He fought depression for decades and attempted suicide in 1984.

He fell at his Manhattan brownstone in the spring of 2007 and died on April 11 of the brain injuries, at 84. Slaughterhouse-Five has been challenged or pulled from schools at least 18 times. The Supreme Court struck down one such removal in Island Trees v. Pico, and when a Missouri board took the book out of its libraries the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis offered every student in the district a free copy. The Library of America issued him in two volumes in 2011 and 2012. Charles Shields's biography, out the same year, quoted friends and relatives calling him cruel and nasty, which complicated the affectionate reputation without displacing it.

Kurt Vonnegut's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Player Piano book
  His first novel, drawn from his years as a publicist at General Electric 1952
• The Sirens of Titan book
  Tralfamadore arrives, and human history turns out to be a spare part 1959
• Cat's Cradle book
  Ice-nine, Bokononism, and eventually the master's degree Chicago had refused him 1963
• Slaughterhouse-Five book
  Twenty-three years after Dresden. It went straight to number one. 1969
• Breakfast of Champions book
  Abandoned in 1971, finished, and panned 1973
• A Man Without a Country book
  His last book, a bestselling collection of essays 2005

• 1940 aged ~18 Enters Cornell and writes a column arguing against entering the war Poor grades and a satirical piece cost him his place in the ROTC unit.
• March 1943 aged 20 Enlists rather than wait to be drafted
• May 14, 1944 aged 21 Comes home on leave to find his mother dead by overdose
• December 22, 1944 aged 22 Captured in the Battle of the Bulge with about 50 other Americans The RAF mistakenly attacked the prisoner trains, killing roughly 150 of them.
• February 13, 1945 aged 22 Survives the firebombing of Dresden in a meat locker He was put to work excavating bodies from the rubble afterward.
• January 1, 1951 aged 28 Quits General Electric to write full time His editor at Collier's thought it was a bad idea.
• 1958 aged ~36 His sister dies two days after her husband is killed in a train wreck The Vonneguts took in three of the four Adams boys.
• 1969 aged ~47 Slaughterhouse-Five reaches number one He became a fixture of the antiwar movement and the college lecture circuit.
• April 11, 2007 aged 84 Dies in Manhattan at 84

• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. the comparison critics reached for
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. the physics Cat's Cradle satirized
• Norman Mailer 1923–2007
  Novelist and journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped establish literary nonfiction. close friend
• Bob Dylan b. 1941
  Songwriter whose poetic lyrics transformed folk, rock, and the role of popular music in public life. shared the antiwar audience
• Muhammad Ali 1942–2016
  Boxing legend and cultural icon known for his athletic brilliance and principled stance against the Vietnam War draft. refused the same war on other grounds