Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I

Introduction

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007), American novelist and short-story writer, best known for his irreverent satires of social and political trends and for his vision of life as an absurd, apocalyptic comedy. Vonnegut’s fable-like tales often use science-fiction or fantasy techniques, presenting fictional worlds that mirror reality in grotesque or exaggerated ways. Vonnegut insists that humans have no choice but to view modern civilization with a mixture of sadness and humor and that the cruelty of life must be countered with a genuine charity for human weakness.

Vonnegut’s novels often mix contrasting literary styles, intertwining philosophical speculation with homespun advice or incorporating his own crude line drawings into the narrative. Among his most consistent themes are the destructive powers of technology and the dehumanizing impersonality of modern society. Many of the same characters reappear in a number of Vonnegut’s works.

II

Early Years

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He studied chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1940 to 1943, but he left without his degree to serve in World War II (1939-1945). In 1944, after his training and shortly before he was shipped out to fight in Europe, his mother committed suicide. Captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge that same year, Vonnegut was held prisoner in a slaughterhouse in the German city of Dresden. When British and American air forces firebombed the city early in 1945, killing more than 130,000 people, Vonnegut and other prisoners survived by taking shelter in an underground meat locker.

After the war, Vonnegut moved with his first wife to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also pursued graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He left in 1947 when his master’s thesis was rejected, taking a job in public relations with General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. During this period he began writing, publishing short stories in popular magazines. Encouraged by a publisher, Vonnegut left his job in 1950 to write full-time.

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III

Literary Career

His first novel, Player Piano (1952), depicts a society controlled by large corporations and machines. Vonnegut was branded a science-fiction writer after his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), which features a bizarre, futuristic plot. He began to receive favorable critical reception starting with his third book, Mother Night (1962), which concerns a man who becomes a pro-German propagandist to conceal his work as an American spy during World War II. The man ends up being tried as a war criminal, and the moral of the story, according to the author, is that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Vonnegut won increasing critical praise with Cat’s Cradle (1963), a novel about an invention that brings about the end of the world, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), about an idealistic but naive philanthropist. In this book Vonnegut introduces one of his recurring characters, Kilgore Trout, a hack science-fiction writer who is often thought to be the author’s alter ego. A collection of Vonnegut’s short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House, was published in 1968.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), often considered Vonnegut’s greatest work, is a fictionalized account of his war experiences. The phrase “So it goes” is repeated almost as a refrain throughout the novel and is characteristic of Vonnegut’s use of simple language to deal with complex emotions and ideas. In the book the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, copes with the traumas of the war by mentally removing himself to a fantasy world. Slaughterhouse-Five vaulted Vonnegut to national and international fame and was later made into a prize-winning motion picture.

Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) was also successful, but those that followed—Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), and Deadeye Dick (1982)—are generally considered his weakest. Many critics called Galapagos (1985)—set in a distant future in which humans have evolved into dimwitted but happy aquatic creatures—a comeback for the author. In 1997 Vonnegut published what he claimed would be his last novel, Timequake, about a rupture in the fabric of time that forces the world to relive the previous decade.

Vonnegut’s other works include the novels Bluebeard (1987) and Hocus Pocus (1990), the play Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971), the children’s book Sun, Moon, Star (1980), and three books of nonfiction essays and meditations: Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (1974), Palm Sunday (1981), and Fates Worse Than Death (1991). Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing in 1994 but later reneged with the partly autobiographical Timequake (1997) and A Man Without a Country (2005), a collection of articles first published mainly in the left-wing magazine In These Times, where Vonnegut was a senior editor. Vonnegut considered himself a socialist and was long active in left-wing causes, particularly issues involving censorship.

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