Kurt Vonnegut Biography and List of Works

American author noted for his pessimistic and satirical novels, best known for SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (1969), a novel based upon his experiences in Dresden, Germany, where he was a prisoner-of-war during the destruction of the town in 1945. Vonnegut employs fantasy and science fiction to examine the horrors and absurdities of 20th century civilization. His constant concern for the effects of technology on humanity has led some critics to consider him a science fiction writer, but the author himself has rejected this label.

'"You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that the wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "My God, my God - " I said to myself, "it's the Children's Crusade."'
(from Slaughterhouse Five)

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis the son of an architect. For the ten years before World War II his father was almost constantly unemployed and the anti-German feelings and cultural prejudices of this period were later revisited in Vonnegut's novel SLAPSTICK (1976).

  "If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of my own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.
   Thanks a lot, big brain."
(from Galápagos, 1985)

In 1940 Vonnegut started his biochemistry studies at Cornell. He wrote anti-war articles for the student newspaper Cornell Sun. However, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in 1943, Vonnegut volunteered for military service. He was sent to Europe and in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, in which he was a battalion scout, Vonnegut was taken prisoner. He was transported to Dresden, where he worked making a diet supplement for pregnant women. Between February 13 and 14 the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Forces made heavy bombing raids on Dresden. Vonnegut was imprisoned in a meat-locker under a slaughterhouse, and was among the few people who survived the total destruction of the city. The Germans later employed him as a miner of corpses in the town. Eventually the city was occupied by Soviet troops in 1945 and Vonnegut was repatriated to the United States.

After the war he studied anthropology at Chicago University from 1944 to 1947, but his M.A. thesis 'Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales' was rejected. However, in 1971 the anthropological department accepted his novel CAT'S CRADLE (1963) in lieu of a thesis and Vonnegut was awarded the degree. In the book Vonnegut explores the destructive rationality of Western science and the return to mysticism, which was beginning to take hold among students in the USA and Europe.

In 1945 Vonnegut married a childhood friend. They had two daughters and a son, and also adopted the three children of Vonnegut's sister, who died of cancer. In 1947 Vonnegut began to work as a reporter and public relations writer for General Electric. His short stories began to appear in various magazines in the early 1950s, including his first science fiction story 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect' for Collier's Weekly in 1950. Vonnegut's first novel, PLAYER PIANO (1952), is a tale of black humour. The story is set in the future, where scientists and engineers of vast corporations attempt to automate everything. As a result, the functions of human beings are gradually taken over by machines. Noteworthy in the book is Vonnegut's prophecy concerning the collapse of the Soviet Union under the impact of American technological know-how.

"When I got to be sixteen, though, I myself had arrived at the conclusion my mother and the neighbours had reached so long ago: that my father was a repellent failure, his work appearing only in the most disreputable publications, which paid him almost nothing. He was an insult to life itself, I thought, when he went on doing nothing with it but writing and smoking all the time - and I mean all the time."
(from Galápagos, 1985)

For roughly twenty years, (1950 to 1970), Vonnegut led, (much as his fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout), the anonymous life of a drugstore-rack writer. Before his breakthrough novel Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut wrote THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959), which features a character for whom the events of history take place simultaneously. CAT'S CRADLE (1963) centres on a scientist who creates a chemical that turns all water into ice and absentmindedly is responsible for the end of the world.

Slaughterhouse Five combines historical facts and science fiction. It depicts the Allied firebombing of Dresden, seen through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim. Billy finds peace of mind after being kidnapped by Tralfamadorians. He learns that the secret of life is to live only in the happy moments. Billy lives on Earth and on the distant planet Tralfamadore, responding to events with the slogan 'So it goes'.

In 1979 Vonnegut divorced his first wife and married the photographer Jill Krementz. In 1984 he made a suicide attempt. The innate pessimism central in Vonnegut's oeuvre, have not made the author's later years any easier. Vonnegut has not specified the culprit responsible for the ills of the world, but views misfortune as a part of our common nature or the result of change. The critical response to his works has also changed from enthusiasm to accusations of recycling essentially the same ideas.

"Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops."

Since BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (1973) Vonnegut has employed his public personality as the author-narrator in his books in a self-conscious and mocking fashion. In JAILBIRD (1979) and DEADEYE DICK (1983) Vonnegut explores idealized Midwestern middle-class values and the social and political course of American history in the Twentieth Century. Vonnegut's commandments for a better world are simple: honour the Sermon of the Mount, stop exploiting and killing people, and be kind to everyone. HOCUS POCUS, the author's thirteenth novel, appeared in 1990. It is set in the years following the defeat of the Vietnam war. Vonnegut has also written plays, essays, critics, and TV-plays. Vonnegut struggled for ten years completing his later novel TIMEQUAKE (1997). Instead of throwing it away, the author published it with fragments of autobiography. The work again centres on Kilgore Trout, thrown in world set back ten years, from February 13, 2001 to February 17, 1991. Inside the story Vonnegut makes comments on all kinds of matters between heaven and earth.

"And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletters about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought.'"
(from Bluebeard, 1987)

On January 2000 Vonnegut was hospitalised due to smoke inhalation after fire at his home. The fire broke out on the top floor of his townhouse at East 48th Street where Vonnegut reportedly had been watching the Super Bowl in his study. Vonnegut tried to extinguish the flames with a blanket.

For further reading: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut by William Rodney Allen (1988); Kurt Vonnegut by J. Klinkowitz (1982); Kurt Vonnegut Jr. by Peter J. Reed (1972); Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice by David Goldsmith (1972); The Vonnegut Statement, ed. by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer (1973); Kurt Vonnegut Jr. by Stanley Schatt (1976); Kurt Vonnegut by James Lundqvist (1977), Kurt Vonnegut by Jerome Klinkovitz (1982). See also: The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (1993). - Note: Vonnegut's character Kilgore Trout appears in GOD BLESS YOU, MR ROSEWATER (1965) and BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (1973). A novel attributed to Kilgore Trout, written by Philip José Farmer, was published in 1975 under the title Venus on the Half-Shelf.

PLAYER PIANO, (1952)
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE: OR, THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE: A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH, (1969)