Kurt Vonnegut
A prisoner of war who survived the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut turned that experience and his distrust of war and technology into darkly funny novels that made him the counterculture's novelist. Beneath the jokes he wrote with plain-spoken decency.
Personality
Vonnegut was sardonic, plain-spoken and humane. Work on his high-school and Cornell student papers taught him short, declarative sentences and a respect for getting facts right, habits he kept all his life. He was an atheist and humanist who served as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, yet admired the Sermon on the Mount and valued churches as a kind of extended family. He credited his family's cook, Ida Young, with much of his moral outlook. His humour was self-deprecating: he described his Purple Heart as his country's second-lowest decoration, awarded for frostbite.
Under pressure
Vonnegut's early life held repeated shocks: the collapse of his family's wealth in the Depression, his mother's death in May 1944 shortly before he shipped out, and capture at the Battle of the Bulge. In Dresden he survived the February 1945 bombing in an underground meat locker and was then put to work recovering bodies from the ruins. It took him more than twenty years to find a way to write about it, and Slaughterhouse-Five describes that struggle openly. Harsh reviews of his 1970s novels stung him, but he kept working and his popularity returned in the 1980s.
The arc
Born in Indianapolis, the youngest child of an architect and a brewing heiress, Vonnegut studied biochemistry at Cornell before enlisting in 1943. After the war he married Jane Cox, studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked as a publicist for General Electric while selling stories to magazines. Player Piano appeared in 1952, followed by The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night and Cat's Cradle; Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) made him famous. He later moved to New York, married the photographer Jill Krementz in 1979 and wrote fourteen novels in all, ending with Timequake (1997). He died on 11 April 2007.
Legacy
Vonnegut is remembered as a darkly humorous social critic whose anti-war, anti-authoritarian books spoke to readers of the Vietnam era; Slaughterhouse-Five went straight to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle were both nominated for the Hugo Award, and his late essay collection A Man Without a Country (2005) was a bestseller. The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library opened in Indianapolis in 2010, the Library of America has collected his novels, and posthumous books such as Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) and Complete Stories (2017) continued to appear.
Birth data confidence · Date high · Time high · Place high · Birth certificate