Kurt Vonnegut

• 1. Introduction

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  Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town down." Then the Germans put him to work pulling bodies from the rubble, an activity he called a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt." He was an American prisoner of war in February 1945, barely past twenty, watching about 25,000 civilians die in a city he had called the first fancy city he ever saw. That night would take more than two decades to become a book. When it finally did, the book made him famous and a generation read it as their own. This is the story of a man born in Indianapolis on the 11th of November 1922, who wrote fourteen novels over fifty years. Where did his bleak laughter come from? Why did he keep returning to an imaginary planet called Tralfamadore? And how does an atheist who loved the Sermon on the Mount answer the question of what people are for?

• 2. A Family Undone

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  Clemens Vonnegut, Kurt's paternal great-grandfather, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company, the start of a long line of German Americans. Kurt's father and grandfather were architects; the firm under Kurt Sr. designed Das Deutsche Haus, now called The Athenaeum, along with the Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company. His mother, Edith Lieber, was born into the city's Gilded Age high society, her family among the wealthiest in town on a fortune from a brewery.

  The Liebers' brewery closed in 1921 after prohibition arrived, and the financial security the family had enjoyed collapsed within a few years. When the Great Depression hit, clients stopped coming to Kurt Sr.'s architectural firm because few people could afford to build. His older siblings, Bernard and Alice, had finished private schools, but Kurt was placed in Public School No. 43, now the James Whitcomb Riley School. His father withdrew into what Vonnegut called a "dreamy artist." His mother grew depressed and bitter and expressed a hatred for her husband that Vonnegut described as "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid."

  Both parents spoke German fluently, but anti-German sentiment during and after World War I drove them to abandon German culture entirely. They did not teach Kurt the language or introduce him to German literature, cuisine, or traditions. Many German Americans were told this was a precondition for American patriotism. The result, Vonnegut said, left him feeling "ignorant and rootless." He credited the warmth he did receive to Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper during his first decade, whom he called "as great an influence on me as anybody." The compassionate, forgiving parts of his beliefs, he said, came from her.

• 3. The Soldier And Dresden

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  The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, and Vonnegut, a member of Cornell's Reserve Officers' Training Corps, lost his place there to poor grades and a satirical newspaper article. He dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted rather than wait to be drafted. The Army trained him to fire and maintain howitzers, then sent him to study mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee.

  On the 14th of May 1944, Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother's Day weekend and learned that his mother had killed herself the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills. Among the possible factors were the family's lost wealth, his coming deployment, and her own failure as a writer. She had often tried in vain to sell short stories to magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post.

  Three months later, Vonnegut shipped to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944 he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and on the 22nd he was captured with about 50 other American soldiers. They were carried by boxcar toward a prison camp south of Dresden, and during the journey the Royal Air Force mistakenly attacked the trains, killing about 150 prisoners. In Dresden he lived in a slaughterhouse and worked in a factory making malt syrup for pregnant women. "There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries," he recalled, "just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories."

  The firebombing began on the 13th of February 1945 and subsided on the 15th. After American forces under General George S. Patton captured Leipzig some 70 miles away, the prisoners were marched toward the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia, then abandoned by their guards. With the help of the Soviet Army, Vonnegut reached a repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, in May 1945. Back home he was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers, and was awarded a Purple Heart. "I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite," he remarked.

• 4. Reporter, Publicist, Novelist

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  On the 1st of September 1945, the twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high-school girlfriend and classmate since kindergarten. They moved to Chicago, where he enrolled at the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill as an anthropology student and worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. He studied under the anthropologist Robert Redfield, whom he called his "most famous professor."

  Jane, who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore, took a scholarship to study Russian literature but dropped out after becoming pregnant with their first child, Mark, born in May 1947. Kurt also left without a degree; his dissertation ideas were all rejected, including one about the Ghost Dance and Cubist movements and a later one about the shapes of stories, turned down "unanimously." He finally received his graduate degree in anthropology 25 years later, when the university accepted his novel Cat's Cradle in lieu of a thesis.

  General Electric then hired Vonnegut as a technical writer and publicist for its Schenectady, New York, News Bureau, where his brother Bernard had worked since 1945 on a silver-iodide cloud-seeding project called Project Cirrus. His first published piece, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," appeared in Collier's in February 1950 and earned him $750. The story concerned a scientist who fears his invention will become a weapon, much as Bernard worried about his own cloud-seeding work. After selling a second story, Vonnegut quit GE on the 1st of January 1951 and moved his family to Cape Cod to write full time, eventually buying a home in Barnstable.

• 5. The Long Apprenticeship

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  Player Piano, published by Scribner's in 1952, drew directly on Vonnegut's years at General Electric. Set at a company much like GE in a post-World War III world, it follows Paul Proteus, an engineer sent among the poor as a double agent who ends up leading them in a machine-smashing, museum-burning revolution. The supercomputer EPICAC is asked by the visiting Shah of Bratpuhr "what are people for?" and gives no answer. Granville Hicks gave the novel a positive review, comparing it to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and calling Vonnegut a "sharp-eyed satirist," though one Bantam edition retitled it Utopia 14 and saddled him with a science-fiction reputation he had to defend.

  For nearly twenty years the recognition stayed modest while the family grew. A third child, Nanette, arrived in 1954. To make ends meet, Vonnegut opened a Saab dealership on Cape Cod in 1957 that went bankrupt within the year, and he designed a World War II board game called GHQ that no publisher bought. In 1958 his sister Alice died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident, and the Vonneguts took in three of the Adams boys, aged 14, 11, and 9.

  The novels of this stretch ranged wildly in plot. The Sirens of Titan (1959) sends the bored billionaire Malachi Constant into a scheme run by robotic aliens from Tralfamadore who need a spare part to repair their ship. Mother Night (1961) follows Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American who becomes a Nazi radio propagandist while spying for the United States, and carries the line, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Cat's Cradle (1963) introduced the substance ice-nine and the invented religion of Bokononism. By the mid-1960s Vonnegut considered quitting. "I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids," he wrote, until an offer to teach at the Iowa Writers' Workshop arrived like "the rescue of a drowning man."

• 6. The Book That Broke Through

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  A Guggenheim Fellowship took Vonnegut back to Dresden in 1967, where he found prominent buildings still in ruins more than twenty years after the bombing. He had been trying to write about the city ever since the war but could produce nothing acceptable to himself or his publishers; the first chapter of the finished novel describes that very struggle. Slaughterhouse-Five, released in 1969, tells of Billy Pilgrim, born like Vonnegut in 1922, a survivor of the firebombing whose story is told out of order. Billy's death, his kidnapping by Tralfamadorians, and the execution of his friend Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot are all disclosed in the opening pages.

  Michael Crichton, writing in The New Republic, said Vonnegut "writes about the most excruciatingly painful things" and attacks "our deepest fears of automation and the bomb." The book went straight to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. Its antiwar message reached a generation marked by the Vietnam War, and Vonnegut later said the loss of confidence in government caused by Vietnam finally allowed an honest conversation about events like Dresden. In 1970 he also worked as a correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War.

  Fame brought its own difficulties. His next novel, Breakfast of Champions, stalled so badly that he stopped writing it altogether in 1971, and when it appeared in 1973 it was panned. Critics said his 1976 novel Slapstick, a meditation on his relationship with his late sister, showed him "putting less effort into storytelling than ever before." Universal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a 1972 film the author called "flawless."

• 7. Belief Without A Church

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  "I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on," Vonnegut once said, describing beliefs that he admitted, when vivisected, "turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush." An atheist, humanist, and freethinker, he served as honorary president of the American Humanist Association and said he learned his atheism from his parents. Yet he did not disdain those who sought the comfort of religion, praising church associations as a kind of extended family. In Palm Sunday he called himself a "Christ-worshipping agnostic," and to a Unitarian Universalist audience he called himself a "Christ-loving atheist."

  The Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes, drew his deep admiration, and he wove it into his own doctrines. In Fates Worse than Death (1991) he complained that during the Reagan administration "anything that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialistic or communistic, and therefore anti-American." He despised the televangelists of the late twentieth century and often reminded readers of the bloody history of the Crusades.

  Vonnegut's politics started, by his own account, with Robert Redfield's theory of the Folk Society. He favored socialism over both liberalism and conservatism and returned often to a line from the socialist Eugene V. Debs: "As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." He distrusted newfangled contraptions too, accepting the label Luddite gladly. "Electronic communities build nothing," he wrote in A Man Without a Country. "We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something."

• 8. What People Are For

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  Tralfamadore, the fictional planet, recurs across The Sirens of Titan; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; Hocus Pocus; and Timequake, its inhabitants marked by a low esteem of humanity. The question that echoes through these books is what the point of life is. When the recurring character Kilgore Trout finds "What is the purpose of life?" written in a bathroom, his answer is, "To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool." In the epigraph to Bluebeard, Vonnegut quotes his son Mark with a plainer reply: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

  In his later years Vonnegut struggled with depression and attempted suicide in 1984. In 1979 he had married the photographer Jill Krementz, and with her he adopted a daughter, Lily, when she was three days old. In a 2006 interview he joked that he would sue the maker of the Pall Mall cigarettes he had smoked since boyhood for false advertising: "Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package they promised to kill me."

  Vonnegut died in Manhattan on the night of the 11th of April 2007, aged 84, from brain injuries suffered in a fall at his brownstone home. His son Mark compiled the posthumous Armageddon in Retrospect in 2008. The fights over his work outlived him too; Slaughterhouse-Five has been objected to or removed in at least 18 instances, and in Island Trees School District v. Pico the United States Supreme Court ruled one such ban unconstitutional. When a school board in Republic, Missouri, withdrew the novel from its libraries, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered a free copy to every student in the district.