Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr Kurt Vonnegut Jr
Born	(1922-11-11)November 11, 1922 Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.
Died	April 11, 2007(2007-04-11) (aged 84) New York, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, Essayist
Nationality	United States
Period	1950-2005
Genre	Literary fiction Satire Black comedy Science Fiction
Website
vonnegut.com

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11 1922 – April 11 2007) (Template:PronEng) was a prolific and genre-bending 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).

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, 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. On May 14 1944, Mothers' Day, his mother, Edith Lieber Vonnegut, committed suicide.

World War II and the firebombing of Dresden

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Photo of Dresden shortly after the bombing

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Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a Corporal 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. Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945, 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." This experience formed the core of one of his most famous works, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a theme in at least six other books.

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," later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite."

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.

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 and the Modern Library.

Early in his adult life, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod.

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. He was 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. Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.

He had seven children: three with his first wife, three more born to his sister Alice and adopted by Vonnegut after she died of cancer, and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. 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.

His daughter Edith ("Edie"), an artist, has also had her work published in a book entitled Domestic Goddesses. She 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 November 11, 1999, the asteroid 25399 Vonnegut was named in Vonnegut's honor.

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.

Vonnegut reportedly smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, unfiltered, which he claimed is a "classy way to commit suicide."

Death

Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11 2007, in Manhattan after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks prior resulted in irreversible brain injuries.

Posthumous tributes

• 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."
• 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."
• Filmmaker Michael Moore included Vonnegut in the dedications for his 2007 film Sicko; at the end of the film, the words "Thank You Kurt Vonnegut for Everything" come up on the screen.
• American composer Zac Lavender wrote a four-movement sinfonia on the subject of Cat's Cradle, as a tribute to Vonnegut.

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. 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.

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."

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, until his death in 2007, focusing 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 new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.

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?"

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 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 In These Times he is also quoted as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."

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."

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.) 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."

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.' "

Writing

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.

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:

• 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
• Slapstick: D
• Jailbird: A
• Palm Sunday: C

The last lines that 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 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

• There was a widely-circulated urban legend that Vonnegut 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 text circulated in Vonnegut's name, and later released as a spoken-word single by Baz Luhrmann, came from 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.

• There is a song by the pop-punk band Nebula entitled "So It Goes." The entire song is an allusion to Slaughterhouse-Five.

External links

• Vonnegut.com Kurt Vonnegut's official website
• Kurt Vonnegut's online fiction at Free Speculative Fiction Online
• The "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut

Databases

• Kurt Vonnegut at the Internet Book List
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr. at IMDb

• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Reviews

• So It Goes: The Work Of Kurt Vonnegut The New York Times. Reviews of books by Vonnegut, and Vonnegut's reviews of other authors' books
• Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Gilbert McInnis. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 46.4 (Summer 2005): 383-396.
• Kurt Vonnegut on DVD: So it goes DVD Spin Doctor. Roundup of Vonnegut films on DVD posted after his death

Interviews

• The Paris Review Interview by David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, Richard Rhodes. Issue 69, Spring 1977.
• Template:WiredForBooks
• Whad'Ya Know? Audio interview by Michael Feldman. October 2, 1999. RealPlayer
• NOW Interview on PBS. October 2005.
• Beating Around the Bush: An Evening of Satire Kurt Vonnegut and Art Buchwald, Barry Crimmins and Paul Krassner at The New York Society for Ethical Culture. October 6, 2005.
• ABC Radio National Audio interview by Phillip Adams. October 2005.
• Kurt Vonnegut Judges Modern Society Audio interview on NPR. January 23, 2006.
• The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti Audio interview on CBC. February 1, 2006.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Final Interview(s) from the New York Observer (July 10, July 15, 2007).
• The Infinite Mind in Second Life with Kurt Vonnegut. August 2006 The Infinite Mind, made broadcast history as it aired a four-part special taped inside the 3-D virtual on-line community Second Life. Among those interviewed in front of a live, virtual audience was this 40-minute conversation with author Kurt Vonnegut.

Fan sites and remembrances

• The Vonnegut Web
• Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, David Brin and John Shirley Remember Kurt Vonnegut on MarsDust.com
• When Kurt Vonnegut Met Sammy Davis, Jr. at 10 Zen Monkeys
• Thanks Kurt Vonnegut by Ethan Bodnar
• StarShipSofa audio podcast on life and works of Kurt Vonnegut Jr
• Page 13 Missing subtitled: The End of an Era and the end of a Feud (a tribute to Vonnegut) by Attila Gyenis

Obituaries and memorials

• The New York Times Obituary
• The Economist Obituary
• The Times (London) Obituary
• "Thank You Mr. Vonnegut" Joel Bleifuss. In These Times