Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (born November 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died April 11, 2007, New York, New York) was an American writer noted for his wryly satirical novels that frequently used postmodern techniques as well as elements of fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization. Much of Vonnegut’s work is marked by an essentially fatalistic worldview that nonetheless embraces modern humanist beliefs.

Early life, war service, and education

Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect, was unemployed during much of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Vonnegut wrote for his high-school newspaper, and he continued the activity at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in biochemistry before leaving in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. Captured by the Germans during World War II, he was one of the survivors of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. After the war Vonnegut took graduate courses in anthropology at the University of Chicago while working as a reporter. He was later employed as a public relations writer in upstate New York, but his reservations about what he considered the deceitfulness of the profession led him to pursue fiction writing full-time.

Beginnings in science fiction

In the early 1950s Vonnegut began publishing short stories. Many of them were concerned with technology and the future, which led some critics to classify Vonnegut as a science fiction writer, though he resisted the label. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), elaborates on those themes, visualizing a completely mechanized and automated society whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scientists and workers in a New York factory town. For his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut imagined a scenario in which the entire history of the human race is considered an accident attendant on an alien planet’s search for a spare part for a spaceship.

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Cat’s Cradle and introducing Kilgore Trout

Vonnegut abandoned science fiction tropes altogether in Mother Night (1961; film 1996), a novel about an American playwright who serves as a spy in Nazi Germany. In Cat’s Cradle (1963) some Caribbean islanders, who practice a religion consisting of harmless trivialities, come into contact with a substance discovered by an atomic scientist that eventually destroys all life on Earth. (In 1963 the University of Chicago granted Vonnegut a master’s degree in anthropology after he submitted Cat’s Cradle as a thesis.) The novel was particularly significant in its development of a slyly irreverent voice that constantly called attention to its own artifice; a similar “metafictional” style would characterize much of Vonnegut’s subsequent work. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) centers on the title character, an eccentric philanthropist, but also introduces the writer Kilgore Trout, a fictional alter ego of Vonnegut who appears throughout his oeuvre.

Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions

Although Vonnegut’s work had already gained a popular audience by the late 1960s, the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969; film 1972) cemented his reputation. Explicitly drawing on his Dresden experience, Vonnegut crafted an absurdist nonlinear narrative in which the bombing raid serves as a symbol of the cruelty and destructiveness of war through the centuries. Critics lauded Slaughterhouse-Five as a modern-day classic, and it won a National Book Award for fiction.

(Read Britannica’s essay “War Stories: 13 Modern Writers Who Served in War.”)

Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973; film 1999)—about a Midwestern businessman who becomes obsessed with Trout’s books—is a commentary on writing, fame, and American social values, interspersed with drawings by Vonnegut. Though reviews were mixed, it quickly became a best seller. Vonnegut’s next two novels were less successful. Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More! (1976; film 1982) focuses on a pair of grotesque siblings who devise a program to end loneliness, and Jailbird (1979) is a postmodern pastiche rooted in 20th-century American social history.

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Later works of fiction

While Vonnegut remained prolific throughout the 1980s, he struggled with depression and in 1984 attempted suicide. His later novels include Deadeye Dick (1982), which revisits characters and settings from Breakfast of Champions; Galápagos (1985), a fantasy of human evolution told from a detached future perspective; Bluebeard (1987), the fictional autobiography of an aging painter; Hocus Pocus (1990), about a college professor turned prison warden; and Timequake (1997), a loosely structured meditation on free will.

Plays, later short stories, and nonfiction

Vonnegut also wrote several plays, including Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970; film 1971); several works of nonfiction, such as the collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974); and several collections of short stories, chief among which was Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). In 2005 he published A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America, a collection of essays and speeches inspired in part by contemporary politics.

Posthumous works

Vonnegut’s posthumously published works include Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a collection of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on war and peace, and a number of previously unpublished short stories, assembled in Look at the Birdie (2009) and While Mortals Sleep (2011). We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012) comprised an early unpublished novella and a fragment of a novel unfinished at his death. A selection of his correspondence was published as Letters (2012). Complete Stories (2017) collects all of his short fiction.

Honors

Vonnegut was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973. In 2010 the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library opened in Indianapolis. In addition to promoting the work of Vonnegut, the nonprofit organization serves as a cultural and educational resource center, including an art gallery and a reading room. In 2015 Vonnegut was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.