Kurt Vonnegut Jr.,
(pronounced
/?v?n???t/
; November 11, 1922 ? April 11, 2007) was an
American
writer. He influenced many other writers. He combined
satire
,
black comedy
, and
science fiction
in his writing. Some of his works include
Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969),
Cat's Cradle
(1963), and
Breakfast of Champions
(1973). He was known for his
humanist
beliefs and was honorary president of the
American Humanist Association
.
[1]
Kurt Vonnegut made a cameo in the
movie Back to School starring Rodney
Dangerfield in 1986.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in
Indianapolis
,
Indiana
, United States. His parents were Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith Lieber.
[2]
He was the youngest of three children. His
ancestors
had come to America from
Germany
in 1855. They were prosperous, originally as brewers and merchants.
[3]
Both his
father
and his
grandfather
attended
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of
Vonnegut & Bohn
. His
great-grandfather
was the founder of the
Vonnegut Hardware Company
, an Indianapolis institution.
[4]
Vonnegut graduated from
Shortridge High School
in Indianapolis in May 1940. He went to
Cornell University
that autumn. He studied
Chemistry
, but he was Assistant
Managing Editor
and Associate Editor of the university newspaper called
The Cornell Daily Sun
.
[5]
He was a member of the
Delta Upsilon
Fraternity
just like his father. Vonnegut joined the
U.S. Army
while he was at Cornell.
[6]
The Army transferred him to the
Carnegie Institute of Technology
and the
University of Tennessee
to study
Mechanical Engineering
.
[1]
On
Mothers' Day
in 1944, his mother committed
suicide
with
sleeping pills
.
[7]
Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and
prisoner of war
(POW) had a deep and powerful effect on his writing. During the war, he was a soldier with a low rank. He was a private with the
423rd Infantry Regiment
,
106th Infantry Division
. Vonnegut was captured during the
Battle of the Bulge
on December 19, 1944.
[8]
He was in prison in the German city of
Dresden
. He became a leader among the prisoners because he could speak German a little bit. But, he told German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came…". The guards beat Vonnegut and stopped him from being a leader.
[9]
He experienced the
fire bombing of Dresden
in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city.
Vonnegut's group of American prisoners of war survived the attack. The Germans had kept them in an underground room for storing meat at a
slaughterhouse
. The Germans called the building
Schlachthof Funf
(Slaughterhouse Five) and the Allied POWs used that name for their prison. Vonnegut said the result of the attack was complete destruction and death that nobody could understand. This experience gave him ideas for his famous
novel
,
Slaughterhouse-Five
. His experience of death and destruction is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In
Slaughterhouse-Five
he described the city as looking like the surface of the moon after the bombing. He told about how the Germans making the prisoners work. They had to break into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies. They had to bury these dead people all together in large holes while German people threw rocks at them and shouted curses.
[9]
Vonnegut said later, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."
[10]
Vonnegut was freed by
Red Army
troops in May 1945 at the
Saxony
-
Czechoslovakian
border.
[9]
The U. S. Army gave him a
Purple Heart
. But he said it was funny because he was not hurt badly at all.
[11]
[12]
He wrote in
Timequake
that he was given the award for getting "frostbite".
[13]
After the war, Vonnegut became an
anthropology
graduate student at the
University of Chicago
. He also worked at the
City News Bureau of Chicago
. Vonnegut admitted that he was a not a good student. One professors said that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists but he was not one of them. In the book
Bagombo Snuff Box
, Vonnegut wrote that the university rejected his first thesis. It was about
Cubist
painters and the leaders of
Native American
uprisings. The university said it was "unprofessional."
He moved from Chicago to
Schenectady
, New York. He worked in public relations for
General Electric
. His brother Bernard worked in the research department at the same company. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in a tiny village called Alplaus. Vonnegut rented an upstairs apartment across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department. He was an active Volunteer Fire-Fighter for a few years. That apartment still has his desk in it. He wrote many of his short stories at that desk carved his name into the bottom of it. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel
Cat's Cradle
as his thesis because they said the story was anthropological. They gave him an
M.A. degree
in 1971.
[14]
[15]
In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked for
Sports Illustrated
magazine for a very short time. He was asked to write about a racehorse that had jumped a fence and tried to run away. Vonnegut stared at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning. Then, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left.
[16]
He was almost going to quit writing, but the
University of Iowa
Writers' Workshop
asked him to teach. While he was there,
Cat's Cradle
became a best-seller, and he began
Slaughterhouse-Five
. That book is now called one of the best American novels of the 20th century. It is on the 100 best lists of
Time
magazine
[17]
and the Modern Library.
[18]
In 1961, he published the famous short story
Harrison Bergeron
.
Vonnegut moved to
Barnstable
,
Massachusetts
, a town on
Cape Cod
.
[19]
He was the manager of the first
Saab
dealership in the U.S.
[20]
After coming home from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox. They had loved each other since they were very young. He wrote about their early relationship in several of his short stories. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with another woman, the photographer
Jill Krementz
. She became his second wife
[1]
after Vonnegut divorced Cox.
He raised seven children. Three were from his first marriage to Cox. He adopted one daughter named Lily with Krementz. Three were his sister Alice's children. Vonnegut adopted them after she died of cancer.
Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams. Vonnegut adopted them after a terrible week in 1958. During that week the children's father James Carmalt Adams was killed in a train crash and their mother died two days later. In his novel
Slapstick
, Vonnegut told how Alice's husband had died two days before she did. Her family tried to keep her husband's death a secret. However, she found out when another patient gave her a newspaper one day before she died. The three boys had a younger brother named Peter Nice. He was a baby when their parents died. Peter went to live with their father's cousin in
Birmingham, Alabama
.
On January 31, 2001, a fire destroyed the top story of Vonnegut's home. He had
smoke inhalation
and was in the hospital in critical condition for four days. He survived, but his personal papers were destroyed.
Vonnegut smoked unfiltered
Pall Mall
cigarettes. He called this habit a "classy way to commit suicide".
[21]
Vonnegut fell down at his home in
Manhattan
and injured his brain. He died on April 11, 2007.
[1]
[22]
[23]
- ↑
1.0
1.1
1.2
1.3
Smith, Dinitia (2007-04-12).
"Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84"
.
The New York Times
. Retrieved
2007-04-12
.
In print: Smith, Dinitia, "Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84",
The New York Times
, April 12, 2007, p.1
- ↑
"Kurt Vonnegut" NNDB
Retrieved 13 November 2010
- ↑
Reed, Peter J. “Kurt Vonnegut.” Magill’s Survey of American Literature. Revised Edition. Pasadena CA: Salem Press, Inc. (2007): EBSCO. Web. 8 Nov. 2010.
- ↑
Kelly, Rin.
"
'Can I Go Home Now?'
"
. The District Weekly. Archived from
the original
on 2008-12-05
. Retrieved
2008-11-25
.
- ↑
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April07/vonnegut.html
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Dies
- ↑
"Kurt Vonnegut Biography"
. Advameg Inc.
- ↑
Reed, Peter
(1999).
Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
.
Florida Atlantic University
, Boca Raton, Florida.
ISBN
1-85723-124-4
.
- ↑
((Vonnegut Letter May 29, 1945,
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/11/slaughterhouse-five.html
))
- ↑
9.0
9.1
9.2
Vonnegut, Kurt, JR.
Armageddon in Retrospect
. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2008.
- ↑
Brinkley, Douglas (2006-08-24).
"Vonnegut's Apocalypse"
. Rolling Stone. Archived from
the original
on 2007-04-16
. Retrieved
2007-04-23
.
- ↑
Sarah Land Prakken:
The Reader's Adviser: A Layman's Guide to Literature
,
R. R. Bowker
1974,
ISBN
0-83520781-1
,
p. 623
- ↑
Arthur Salm:
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut: So it goes
Archived
2012-09-21 at the
Wayback Machine
,
The San Diego Union-Tribune
April 15, 2007
- ↑
Vonnegut, Kurt (1997).
Timequake
.
- ↑
Katz, Joe (April 13, 2007).
"Alumnus Vonnegut dead at 84"
. Chicago Maroon. Archived from
the original
on 2007-05-25
. Retrieved
2007-04-17
.
- ↑
David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, Richard Rhodes,
"The Art of Fiction No. 64: Kurt Vonnegut"
Archived
2010-09-14 at the
Wayback Machine
,
Paris Review
, Issue 69, Spring 1977
- ↑
Excerpt: 'Armageddon in Retrospect'
, NPR.org, June 3, 2008.
- ↑
"100 Best Novels: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)"
. Time Magazine. 2005-10-16. Archived from
the original
on 2009-05-01
. Retrieved
2007-04-12
.
- ↑
"100 Best Novels"
. Modern Library. July 20, 1998
. Retrieved
2007-04-12
.
- ↑
Levitas, Mitchel (August 19, 1968).
"A Slight Case of Candor"
.
The New York Times
. Retrieved
2007-04-12
.
- ↑
"SAAB Cape Cod ? Kurt Vonnegut's dealership"
. www.saabhistory.com. April 15, 2007
. Retrieved
2008-11-01
.
[
permanent dead link
]
- ↑
Barber, Lynn (February 5, 2006).
"I smoke, therefore I am"
. London: The Guardian Observer
. Retrieved
2007-04-12
.
- ↑
Feeney, Mark (2007-04-12).
"Counterculture author, icon Kurt Vonnegut Jr. dies at 84"
.
The Boston Globe
. Retrieved
2007-04-12
.
- ↑
Lloyd, Christopher (April 12, 2007).
"Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84"
. Indianapolis Star.
Archived
from the original on 2007-10-10
. Retrieved
2007-04-12
.