The Wit and Wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut

The wit and wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut

10:51 PM PDT, April 11, 2007

"When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment lasts forever."— "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons," 1974.

" ... when a society is in great danger, [writers are] likely to sound the alarms. I have the canary-bird-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines with them to detect gas before men got sick. The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over. But it made no difference whatsoever. Nobody important cared. But I continue to think that artists — all artists — should be treasured as alarm systems."— Playboy interview, 1973

"You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed."— Undated speech to the American Psychiatric Assn.

"I do think ... that public speaking is almost the only way a poet or a novelist or a playwright can have any political effectiveness in his creative prime. If he tries to put his politics into a work of the imagination, he will foul up his work beyond all recognition."— "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons," 1974

"Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well-connected."— "Slaughterhouse-Five," 1969

"The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems."— "Player Piano," 1952

"Poverty is a relatively mild disease ... but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike."— "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," 1965.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."— "Mother Night," 1962

Kurt Vonnegut - The Los Angeles Times

REMEMBERING: Kurt Vonnegut visits the place where he survived the Dresden bombing, the subject of “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
(Matthias Rietschel / AP)
Oct 7, 1998

KURT VONNEGUT: 1922-2007

His popular novels blended social criticism, dark humor

By Elaine Woo

Times Staff Writer

April 12, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut, an American cultural hero celebrated for his wry, loonily imaginative commentary on war, apocalypse, technology, materialism and other afflictions in "Slaughterhouse-Five" and other novels, has died. He was 84.

One of the last of a generation of great American novelists of World War II, Vonnegut died Wednesday night in New York City.

Vonnegut suffered brain injuries in a fall several weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz. He had homes in Manhattan and Sagaponack, N.Y.

"There was never a kinder and, at the same time, wittier writer to be with personally," author Tom Wolfe, a friend and admirer of Vonnegut's, told The Times. "He was just a gem in that respect. And as a writer, I guess he's the closest thing we had to a Voltaire. He could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it, which made him quite remarkable.

"He was never funny just to be funny," Wolfe added.

An obscure science fiction writer for two decades before earning mainstream acclaim in 1969 with "Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut was an American original, often compared to Mark Twain for a vision that combined social criticism, wildly black humor and a call to basic human decency. He was, novelist Jay MacInerny once said, "a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion."

Although he was disdained by some critics who thought his work was too popular and accessible, his fiction inspired volumes of scholarly comment as well as websites maintained by young fans who have helped keep all 14 of his novels in print over a 50-year career. Five of his novels have made the leap into films.

He is "together with John Hawkes and Gunter Grass … the most stubbornly imaginative" of writers, novelist John Irving once wrote of Vonnegut. "He is not anybody else, or even a version of anybody else, and he is a writer with a cause."

His novels, which include "The Sirens of Titan," "Cat's Cradle," "Mother Night" and "Breakfast of Champions," introduced a revolving cast of odd characters, from the downtrodden visionary Billy Pilgrim to Kilgore Trout, the unsuccessful writer who was Vonnegut's alter ego.

Vonnegut was also an essayist, playwright and short-story writer, whose shorter pieces were collected in such volumes as "Welcome to the Monkey House" (1968), "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons" (1974) and "Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s" (1991).

"Slaughterhouse-Five" was a book he tried but failed to write for 25 years. An agile mix of fantasy and Vonnegut's World War II experiences, it features time traveler Pilgrim who, like Vonnegut, survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden.

Unorthodox in structure and patently antiwar, the novel resonated with a rebellious younger generation. Vonnegut became an icon of the countercultural 1970s and his book became a milestone of postmodern American literature, unequaled in force or artistry by any of his later novels.

"He writes about the most excruciatingly painful things," Michael Crichton observed in a review of "Slaughterhouse-Five" for the New Republic. "His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. Nobody else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal novelistic approaches."

He made no pretense of his intentions: He was a public writer — one who directly addressed some of the most vexing issues of his day.

"My motives are political," he once told Playboy magazine. "I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society…. Mainly, I think they should be — and biologically have to be — agents of change."

On another occasion he explained that his goal in writing novels was to "catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents" and "poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world."

A lonely child

A fourth-generation German American, Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on Nov. 11, 1922.

Although he had an older brother, Bernard, and a sister, Alice, Vonnegut was often lonely as a child. His mainstay growing up was a black woman named Ida Young, the family cook. He suggested that the "intolerable sentimentality" that some critics saw in his writing was owed to Young, who spent long hours reading to him from an anthology of poems about undying love, faithful dogs and humble, happy homes.

The son and grandson of architects, he grew up in prosperity until the Depression struck and his father, Kurt Sr., went 10 years without a commission. The family finances were so abysmal that his mother, Edith, who had been born to affluence, had to sell the family china. Vonnegut would later say his parents left a legacy of pacifism and irreverence as well as "bone-deep sadness," and in much of his later fiction his characters would be afflicted by unemployment and the subsequent loss of status and purpose.

When the family money ran out, he left private school for the public Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, where his scrawny physique made him the butt of jokes. Nicknamed "Snarf" after classmates spied him sniffing his armpits absentmindedly, he described himself as "a real skinny, narrow-shouldered boy … a preposterous kind of flamingo," not unlike the oddball Billy Pilgrim in the novel that would make Vonnegut famous. He found a niche on the staff of the campus newspaper, the Echo, as a writer and editor.

When he went off to Cornell University in 1940, he followed his older brother into science as a chemistry major. Unlike his brother, however, Vonnegut was a poor student who gained attention for his practical jokes, such as showing up for final exams of large classes he was not enrolled in and shredding the exam in front of the astonished instructor.

He also became known for writing, which took up most of his time in college. He served as managing editor of the Cornell Daily Sun as well as author of a thrice-weekly humor column.

Many years later, when he was asked to identify his cultural influences, he would often name serious writers such as Twain, Jonathan Swift and James Joyce. "But the truth is that I am a barbarian, whose deepest cultural debts are to Laurel and Hardy … Buster Keaton, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin … and so on," he wrote in 1972. "They made me hilarious during the Great Depression and all the lesser depressions after that."

He was close to flunking out of Cornell in early 1943 when he joined the Army and was sent to Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. He was trained in artillery and as an advance infantry scout.

Just before Vonnegut shipped out to England, his mother committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills on Mother's Day, 1944. She had suffered bouts of depression after failing to make much money writing magazine fiction in the 1930s, an activity she took on to bolster the family income. According to her son's recollection, she also had become dependent on alcohol and "unlimited amounts of prescribed barbiturates." Her death was the first in a series of bizarre and brutal turns in Vonnegut's life that would color his later writing.

In late 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and wound up in a prisoner work group in Dresden, a city so treasured for its baroque beauty that no one thought it would be targeted. If he remained there, Vonnegut thought, he would be safe until the war ended.

But on Feb. 13, 1945, Dresden was hit by successive waves of British and American bombers, which destroyed the city's extraordinary architecture and art treasures and killed at least 60,000 people and perhaps as many as 200,000 — more than in the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Vonnegut and his group were spared because their prison was as good as a concrete-block underground bunker: "a cool meat-locker under a slaughterhouse," two floors below ground, which they shared with six guards and "ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses and sheep."

When the bombing was over, he emerged to find that the Allies had "burnt the whole damn town down." He and the other prisoners were put to work as "corpse miners," recovering the dead who had suffocated in bomb shelters. Vonnegut dragged out the bodies and piled them on huge communal funeral pyres. The recovery effort eventually was halted and the Germans just torched the dead where they lay, turning the shelters into crematories.

"It was a fancy thing to see, a startling thing," Vonnegut would recall in a 1977 Paris Review interview.

Emotional event

Although he would sometimes downplay Dresden's importance, he acknowledged that the experience gave him "something to write about."

It also blackened his view of the world.

"The firebombing of Dresden was an emotional event without a trace of military importance…. " he said in an undated speech reprinted in "Fates Worse Than Death."

"I will say again what I have often said in print and in speeches, that not one Allied soldier was able to advance as much as an inch because of the firebombing of Dresden. Not one prisoner of the Nazis got out of prison a microsecond earlier. Only one person on earth clearly benefited, and I am that person," said Vonnegut, referring to his bestselling novel. "I got about five dollars for each corpse, not counting my fee tonight."

The horror and absurdity of the catastrophe would plague him for years as he tried, and finally rejected, the idea that one could write conventionally about something that so utterly defied logic. Dresden capped a period swollen with trauma for Vonnegut, who struggled in later years with his own depressions and once nearly took his own life.

Vonnegut was released from the Army in 1945 and married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Cox. He enrolled at the University of Chicago, switched his major to anthropology, and got a job reporting for the Chicago City News Bureau. The rookie reporter was assigned murders, car crashes and weather stories. In 1947, he quit school after his master's thesis, "Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales," was rejected by his faculty committee. (In 1971, after he had become the illustrious author, the university finally accepted his novel "Cat's Cradle" as his thesis and awarded him his degree.) He also quit journalism for a higher-paying job in public relations at General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., where his brother was an atmospheric physicist.

By day he wrote news releases that promoted GE's philosophy of progress as its "most important product," a notion he did not invent and that for Vonnegut quickly lost its charm. At night, he began to write short stories that showed the potential downsides of scientific progress, such as the perils of computers and extraplanetary radio. The notion that humankind was devising the means of its own unhappiness and destruction would emerge as a dominant theme in his later works.

Vonnegut's stories appeared in the leading magazines of the 1950s, including the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Ladies Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, as well as in more specialized publications such as Fantasy and Science Fiction. By 1950, he found he could support himself and his growing family as a writer and left GE.

The environment of GE, in which he was "completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines," inspired his first novel. "Player Piano," published in 1952 and reissued in paperback a few years later under the title "Utopia 14," revolves around an engineer who rebels against the mechanization of society, which has made life easier but deprived people of a sense of purpose. The engineer seeks spiritual comfort as a follower of a minister trained in anthropology. According to Jerome Klinkowitz, a noted Vonnegut scholar, the novel shows readers "how progress as an end in itself is a defeating proposition."

The book was largely ignored by critics, so Vonnegut rededicated himself to the short-story market while working other jobs. He taught high school English on Cape Cod and sold Saabs.

Seven years passed before his next novel, "The Sirens of Titan" (1959), appeared. The plot concerns extraterrestrials who meddle in the course of human history to help a space traveler obtain a spare part for his spacecraft. Sold as science fiction even though it was a sophisticated satire of the genre, it was sold at bus stops and drugstores and quickly went out of print. Klinkowitz and John Somer, in their book "The Vonnegut Statement," noted that copies sold for $50 in the college underground until it was reissued by Dell in the 1960s.

"Mother Night," published in 1962, presented the character of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American intelligence agent in Germany at the start of World War II who poses so successfully as a Nazi radio propagandist that he is kidnapped by Israeli operatives, tried for war crimes and commits suicide. Vonnegut summed up the lesson of this avowedly moralistic tale in this line: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

A transitional novel that has few science fiction elements, it caught the attention of major reviewers, who were impressed by its masterful tone. Critic Richard Schickel, writing in Harper's, called it "a wonderful splash of bright, primary colors, an artful, zestful cartoon that lets us see despair without forcing us to surrender to it."

With his next book Vonnegut began to earn wider literary notice. The protagonist of "Cat's Cradle," published in 1963, is a writer who travels to the Caribbean where he becomes a follower of Bokonon, a religious maverick who promises salvation through a freewheeling gospel of "fomas" or harmless untruths. The writer also witnesses the deadly power of Ice-9, a substance that kills everything it touches by freezing it.

The title of the novel refers to the string game in which the player loops the string to make supposedly recognizable images, such as a cat's cradle. Vonnegut exposes it as a hoax: "No damn cat. No damn cradle," one of the characters bitterly complains. It was Vonnegut's way of saying that many accepted wisdoms, including political or religious doctrines, in fact explain nothing at all.

Among several notable writers who praised the novel was Graham Greene, who said it was "one of the three best novels of the year by one of the most able living writers."

"Cat's Cradle" was followed by the harshly satirical "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls before Swine," published in 1965. This novel introduced the character of Eliot Rosewater, a millionaire philanthropist disgusted by his wealth and its power to warp ideals. He preaches love through a motto that sounds the theme of all of Vonnegut's writing: "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind."

The book also introduced Trout, the aging, under-appreciated science fiction writer. The Greene review notwithstanding, Vonnegut saw himself in the same literary rut as the fictional Trout and loudly complained about critics' underestimation of his talent.

"I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station," he wrote in an essay printed in the New York Times Book Review in 1965.

He wrote "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" at a low point in his career, when he was barely earning enough money to support his family, which had doubled in size due to tragic occurrences in 1958. That year he adopted three of his sister's children after she and her husband died within days of each other, she of cancer and he in a train accident. In 1965, Vonnegut left the family home in Cape Cod and rolled into Iowa City in a dilapidated Volkswagen to join the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. It would turn out to be an auspicious move.

A colleague at the workshop, critic Robert Scholes, became his champion and devoted a chapter to Vonnegut's fiction in "The Fabulators," a 1967 book of criticism that began to alter the view of Vonnegut in scholarly circles.

His early novels were reissued in paperback around the same time, advancing his underground reputation. Two of his novels, "Player Piano" and "Mother Night," were reissued in hardcover and earned serious critical attention.

He also returned to journalism, writing first-person essays for the New York Times magazine, Life and Esquire on topics ranging from transcendental meditation to the Apollo 11 moon flight. One piece, a humorous dictionary review, caught the attention of Delacorte Press publisher Seymour Lawrence, who offered him a three-book contract in 1968. That year Vonnegut won a Guggenheim fellowship to travel to Dresden.

The first book to appear under the new contract was "Slaughterhouse-Five."

Vonnegut's struggle to write this novel began after his return from the war more than two decades earlier.

" … I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it…. I would head myself into my memory of it, the circuit breakers would kick out; I'd head in again, I'd back off," he recalled in speech to students at Iowa City in 1969. "It's like Heinrich Boll's book 'Absent Without Leave' — stories about German soldiers with the war part missing. You see them leave and return, but there's this terrible hole in the middle. That is like my memory of Dresden…. "

The breakthrough came when he realized that instead of writing a story about the war, he could simply tell the truth. The Vietnam War was a catalyst that freed him to "finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis. And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly," he wrote in an essay collected in his 2005 book "A Man Without a Country."

"Slaughterhouse" begins with an unusual apology from Vonnegut, who inserts himself as the narrator. "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time," he complains in the first chapter. Perhaps the tumult of the late 1960s — when Norman Mailer, among other prominent writers, was also experimenting with form by injecting himself into the story — was causing this disruption in literary convention.

Vonnegut also never depicts the firebombing itself. Instead, the story loops backward and forward in time, going from Pilgrim as a young man held by the Germans in Dresden, to Pilgrim as a senile widower imprisoned by extraterrestrials, to Pilgrim in middle age at a convention of fellow optometrists. The effect is bewildering — deliberately so, because part of the author's message is that profound puzzlement is the only appropriate response to the senselessness of Dresden's destruction.

The book is "so short and jumbled and jangled … because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre," Vonnegut writes. "Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

"And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?' "

Antiwar message

There was no mistaking the antiwar tilt of the novel, released while the U.S. was mired in Vietnam. Most of Pilgrim's fellow soldiers are poorly trained and utterly demoralized. Death and tragedy abound, punctuated by the narrator's alternately weary and flippant refrain: "So it goes."

But Vonnegut leaves little doubt as to his intent: "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

"I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."

The novel reflected the preoccupations of the era, addressing not only war but overpopulation, ecology and consumerism. It was the lead review in major book sections, such as the New York Times Book Review, where Scholes raved that Vonnegut was a "true artist" and "among the best writers of his generation."

Critic Leslie Fiedler, writing in an influential 1970 essay in Esquire, said that "Slaughterhouse-Five" was "less about Dresden than about Vonnegut's failure to come to terms with it — one of those beautifully frustrating works about their own impossibility, like Fellini's '8 1/2 .' "

Other distinguished critics saw "Slaughterhouse" in less flattering terms. Alfred Kazin was turned off by what he termed Vonnegut's "impishly sentimental humor" about the absurdities of war. Vonnegut, according to Kazin, "is at his best not in 'Slaughterhouse-Five' (really a satire on the Great American novel) but in spoofs of the American scene like 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.' … In 'Slaughterhouse-Five' Vonnegut seems, all too understandably, subdued by his material and plays it dumb. He is funnier when he is ruthless."

Through the 1970s, the novel endured attacks by would-be censors, who opposed its abundant obscenities and graphic scenes. It was made into a well-regarded 1972 movie by director George Roy Hill. The book also was ranked 18th on the list of the top 100 English-language novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library.

Vonnegut appeared not to take his accomplishments too seriously. In the Paris Review interview he said writing was no more complicated than a good practical joke. "If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper," he said, "what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again." He said his novels were essentially "mosaics of jokes."

A vow to quit writing

Although "Slaughterhouse" thrust him to the vanguard of American letters, he grew depressed and vowed never to write another novel. "I felt after I finished 'Slaughterhouse-Five' that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to," he wrote in "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons." It was a threat he would make several times over the next few decades.

He wrote a play that was produced on Broadway, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," as well as a teleplay for public television, "Between Time and Timbuktu." He covered the Republican National Convention in 1972 for Harper's and was elected vice president of the PEN/American Center.

"Breakfast of Champions," published in 1973, marked the then-50-year-old author's return to the novel. He acknowledged that it was in some important ways a cathartic book: The pathetic Kilgore Trout, who by then had appeared in several Vonnegut novels, finally becomes a rich and famous writer.

The novel, which earned generally tepid reviews, did not mark the end of Vonnegut's depressions, however. In fact, it directly refers to the author's worries about depression and suicide in lines such as " 'You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did,' I said." In 1984 Vonnegut attempted suicide with alcohol and pills and spent a month in a mental ward. He later told the Washington Post that he wasn't crazy; he was angry. "If I do myself in sometime, and I might, it will be because of my mother's example," he said, referring to her lethal overdose decades earlier. He narrowly escaped serious injury in January 2000 after a fire at his East Side Manhattan brownstone, apparently caused by a cigarette he had left burning in his study. He was hospitalized in critical condition for smoke inhalation.

"Now I'm thinking of suing the makers of Pall Mall," the inveterate chain-smoker joked after his recovery. "On the package they promise to kill me and they still haven't done it."

Such black humor appealed to successive generations of Vonnegut fans, whose cultish ardor played a part in one of the more successful Internet hoaxes of recent years.

In 1997, an e-mail forwarded to thousands of people gave what was purported to be the text of an MIT commencement address given by Vonnegut, a popular commencement speaker. It was full of folksy witticisms, such as "Wear sunscreen" and "Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone," that many people — including his wife — believed were quintessential Vonnegut. The text was actually written by a Chicago newspaper columnist and forwarded without her byline or permission. Vonnegut had become the victim of a "foma," the word signifying a harmless untruth that he had invented three decades earlier in "Cat's Cradle."

Vonnegut had married Krementz in 1979, after his first marriage ended in divorce. His second marriage produced a daughter, Lily. He also had three children from his first marriage, Mark, Edith and Nanette; and three he adopted after his sister's death, James, Steven and Kurt Adams.

He collected many of his shorter writings into four volumes, including "Bagombo Snuff Box" (1999), which featured his previously uncollected short fiction; "God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian" (2000), a series of riffs on dead eminences such as William Shakespeare that he originally wrote for radio; and "A Man Without a Country," a collection of short essays and speeches (2005). Among his other novels were "Slapstick, or Lonesome No More" in 1976, "Jailbird" in 1979, "Dead-Eye Dick" in 1982, "Galapagos" in 1985 and "Bluebeard" in 1987. His last novel, "Timequake" in 1997, split the critics, with some expressing annoyance at its familiar tone of weary bemusement and others calling it his funniest work in years.

After "Timequake," he said he would write no more novels, but in 2000, while serving a term as State Author for New York, he admitted to having reneged on the promise. He was working on a novel about a standup comic in New York. The title suggested another irreverent rumination on modern life and its ills. He was calling it "If God Were Alive Today."

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein contributed to this report.

** Bibliography

Novels

"Timequake" New York, G.P. Putnam's, 1997.

"Three Complete Novels." New York, Wings Books, 1995.

"Hocus Pocus; or, What's the Hurry, Son?" New York, Putnam, and London, Cape, 1990.

"Bluebeard" New York, Delacorte Press, 1987 London, Cape, 1988.

"Galápagos" New York, Delacorte Press, and London, Cape, 1985.

"Deadeye Dick" New York, Delacorte Press, 1982; London, Cape, 1983.

"Jailbird" New York, Delacorte Press, and London, Cape, 1979.

"Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More!" New York, Delacorte Press, and London, Cape, 1976.

"Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye, Blue Monday" New York, Delacorte Press, and London, Cape, 1973.

"Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade" New York, Delacorte Press, 1969; London, Cape, 1970.

"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls Before Swine" New York, Holt Rinehart, and London, Cape, 1965.

"Cat's Cradle" New York, Holt Rinehart, and London, Gollancz, 1963.

"Mother Night" New York, Fawcett, 1962; London, Cape, 1968.

"The Sirens of Titan" New York, Dell, 1959; London, Gollancz, 1962.

"Player Piano" New York, Scribner, 1952; London, Macmillan, 1953; as Utopia 14, New York, Bantam, 1954.

Plays

"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" adaptation of his novel (produced New York, 1979).

"Timesteps" (produced Edinburgh, 1979).

"Fortitude," in "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons" 1974.

"Between Time and Timbuktu; or, Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy" (televised 1972; produced New York, 1976). New York, Delacorte Press, 1972; London, Panther, 1975.

"The Very First Christmas Morning" in Better Homes and Gardens (Des Moines), December 1962.

"Happy Birthday, Wanda June" (as "Penelope," produced Cape Cod, Mass., 1960; revised version, as "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," produced New York, 1970; London, 1977). New York, Delacorte Press, 1970; London, Cape, 1973.

Other

"A Man Without a Country" New York, Seven Stories Press, 2005.

"God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian" New York, Seven Stories Press, 2000.

"Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing" (with Lee Stringer). New York, Seven Stories Press, 1999.

"Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s" New York, Putnam, 1991.

"Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut" Edited by William Rodney Allen. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

"Nothing Is Lost Save Honor: Two Essays" Jackson, Miss., Nouveau Press, 1984.

"Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage" New York, Delacorte Press, and London, Cape, 1981.

"Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons: Opinions" New York, Delacorte Press, 1974; London, Cape, 1975.

* Source: Contemporary Novelists, (7th edition, St. James Press, 2001)

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Kurt Vonnegut - The New York Times

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84

By Dinitia Smith
The New York Times
Wednesday 11 April 2007

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and '70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. "Mark Twain," Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, "Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage," "finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died."

Not all Mr. Vonnegut's themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels - 14 in all - were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago "filled with bittersweet lies," a narrator says).

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. "The firebombing of Dresden," Mr. Vonnegut wrote, "was a work of art." It was, he added, "a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany."

His experience in Dresden was the basis of "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age."

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," summed up his philosophy:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' "

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him "one of the most able of living American writers." Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a fourth-generation German-American and the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut's brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. "When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information," Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, " 'All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.' "

"My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside," he wrote.

Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American war planes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

"The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified," he wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death." When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children: Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut's sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts adopted their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on "The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales." It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel "Cat's Cradle" as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," to Collier's magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an auto dealership.

His first novel was "Player Piano," published in 1952. A satire on corporate life - the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses - it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

"Player Piano" was followed in 1959 by "The Sirens of Titan," a science fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published "Mother Night," involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut's other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like "Slaughterhouse-Five," in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, "Mother Night" was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.

In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published "Cat's Cradle." Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with "Slaughterhouse-Five." It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. "You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves," an English colonel says in the book. "We had forgotten that 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.' "

As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.

In "Slaughterhouse-Five," Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round," Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, "was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

"Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."

One of many Zen-like words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut's books, "so it goes" became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

"Slaughterhouse-Five" reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

"The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem," he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, "Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity."

Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)
In 1979 Mr. Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday" (1973), calling it a "tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.

In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published "Timequake," a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, "a stew" of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. "If I'd wasted my time creating characters," Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his "recycling," "I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter."

Though it was a bestseller, it also met with mixed reviews. "Having a novelist's free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride," R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: "The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut's transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir."

Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to "Timequake" that it would be his last novel. And so it was.
His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, "A Man Without a Country." It, too, was a best seller.

In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called "Requiem," which has these closing lines:

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.

A Sad Day

Governor's Arts Award winning author Kurt Vonnegut glances down at his daughter Lilly,7, in this file photo from June 29, 1990, during the New York State Governor's Arts Awards ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kurt Vonnegut's wife, Jill Krementz says the satirical novelist of works such as 'Slaughterhouse-Five' and 'Cat's Cradle' has died Wednesday Aprill 11, 2007 at age 84 in Manhattan.(AP Photo/David Kantor-File)
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at age 84
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.

Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

"I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.

He always said he was a humanist and a socialist. That's how he described himself."

His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people in the city.

"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.

"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a "fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.

When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.

Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their fate. Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.

He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."

In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at In These Times. Bleifuss said he had been trying recently to get Vonnegut to write something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.

"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.

"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."
___

Associated Press writers Michael Warren, Hillel Italie and Chelsea Carter contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

And now an interlude......

Gotta love Battlestar Galactica for telling it like it is.