Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on the 11th of November 1922. He descended from a long line of German Americans whose family fortune rested on the Vonnegut Hardware Company founded by his great-grandfather Clemens. His father and grandfather Bernard were architects who designed notable buildings like Das Deutsche House, now called The Athenaeum. The financial security that once defined his childhood vanished within years after prohibition closed the Lieber brewery in 1921. When the Great Depression struck, clients for his father's architectural firm became scarce and his mother Edith grew depressed and bitter. She labored to regain their lost status while expressing hatred for her husband that Vonnegut described as corrosive as hydrochloric acid. Her suicide in May 1944 left him orphaned at age twenty-one during a time when he faced deployment overseas.
Ida Young served as the family's African-American cook and housekeeper during the first decade of his life. Vonnegut credited her with raising him and giving him values he would carry forever. He stated she gave him decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to him. Ida Young remained as great an influence on him as anybody else throughout his life. He described her as humane and wise and added that the compassionate forgiving aspects of his beliefs came directly from her. This early loss of wealth combined with the absence of his mother shaped the rootless feeling he carried into adulthood.
Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army in March 1943 after dropping out of Cornell University. He received training in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee before being deployed to Europe. On the 22nd of December 1944, he was captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge along with about fifty other American soldiers. They were taken by boxcar to a prison camp south of Dresden where they lived in a slaughterhouse. The Germans did not expect Dresden to be bombed because there were very few air-raid shelters and no war industries in town.
On the 13th of February 1945, Allied forces engaged in a firebombing of the city that killed about twenty-five thousand civilians over the following days. Vonnegut survived by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground. He recalled the cool environment inside the locker with cadavers hanging all around him. When they emerged from the shelter the city was gone and had been burnt down completely. He and other American prisoners were put to work immediately after the bombing excavating bodies from the rubble. He described this activity as a terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt. The American POWs were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after U.S. General George S. Patton's Third Army captured Leipzig.
After returning to the United States, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox on the 1st of September 1945. The couple moved to Chicago where he enrolled at the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill as an anthropology student. He studied under anthropologist Robert Redfield who became his most famous professor. Shortly thereafter General Electric hired him as a technical writer then publicist for their Schenectady News Bureau. His brother Bernard worked at GE focusing mainly on cloud seeding projects that quickly became a joint program between GE and the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
In 1949 Vonnegut published his first piece titled Report on the Barnhouse Effect in Collier's magazine for which he received seven hundred fifty dollars. The story concerned a scientist who fears that his invention will be used as a weapon much like Bernard was fearing about his own cloudseeding work. In early 1951 Vonnegut quit GE to write full time moving with his family to Cape Cod Massachusetts. He initially moved to Osterville but eventually purchased a home in Barnstable. His first novel Player Piano was published by Scribner's in 1952 receiving favorable reviews yet selling poorly.
Vonnegut spent almost two years teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop before being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany in March 1967. By the time he won it he was becoming a well-known writer though still struggling financially. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe including to Dresden where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins. Slaughterhouse-Five was released in 1969 after nearly twenty years of writing about his war experiences without finding anything acceptable to himself or publishers.
The novel rocketed Vonnegut to fame and rose immediately to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. It tells of Billy Pilgrim who survives the bombing of Dresden just as Vonnegut had done decades earlier. The story is told in a non-linear fashion disclosing climaxes like Billy's death in 1976 and his kidnapping by aliens from Tralfamadore nine years earlier within its opening pages. Michael Crichton wrote in The New Republic that Vonnegut writes about excruciatingly painful things attacking our deepest fears of automation and the bomb. The antiwar message resonated with readers marked by the Vietnam War era.
After Slaughterhouse-Five was published Vonnegut embraced the fame and financial security that attended its release. He gave college commencement addresses around the country and taught at City College of New York during the 1973-1974 academic year. His personal difficulties materialized in numerous ways including painfully slow progress on his next novel Breakfast of Champions which he stopped writing altogether in 1971. When it finally released in 1973 critics panned it noting it lacked substance and seemed an exercise in literary playfulness.
Vonnegut struggled with depression throughout his later life attempting suicide in 1984. Two years later he began seeing a psychologist weekly after stopping Ritalin medication prescribed for him following his son Mark's mental breakdown in 1972. In 1979 he married Jill Krementz a photographer whom he met while she worked on a series about writers in the early 1970s. They adopted a daughter named Lily when the baby was three days old remaining married until his death. His final book A Man Without a Country became a bestseller published in 2005 shortly before his own passing.
Vonnegut was a pacifist who believed civilization ended in World War I and humanity remained trying to recover from that event. He stated in a 1987 interview that wars were as easy to stop as glaciers though plain old death would still exist regardless. Slaughterhouse-Five is best known for its antiwar themes but he expressed beliefs beyond depicting Dresden destruction. One character Mary O'Hare opined that wars were partly encouraged by books and movies starring glamorous war-loving men like Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
He wrote in Palm Sunday that he learned how vile his religion could be when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nuclear war or deployed nuclear arms are mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels including Player Piano where computer EPICAC controls the nuclear arsenal. In Cat's Cradle John's original purpose setting pen to paper was writing an account of what prominent Americans did as Hiroshima was bombed. Vonnegut made comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima throughout his work expressing anger against administrations that continued warfare without questioning its necessity.
His works have evoked ire on several occasions with Slaughterhouse-Five removed from institutions at least eighteen times. The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a school district ban calling it anti-American anti-Christian anti-Semitic and just plain filthy. Late 2011 saw two biographies released including Gregory Sumner's Unstuck in Time and Charles J. Shields's And So It Goes which created controversy for portraying him as distant cruel and nasty. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him posthumously in 2015 while an asteroid named 25399 Vonnegut honors his memory.
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Common questions
When and where was Kurt Vonnegut born?
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on the 11th of November 1922. He descended from a long line of German Americans whose family fortune rested on the Vonnegut Hardware Company founded by his great-grandfather Clemens.
What happened to Kurt Vonnegut during World War II?
Kurt Vonnegut was captured by German forces on the 22nd of December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge. He survived the firebombing of Dresden on the 13th of February 1945 by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground.
Who influenced Kurt Vonnegut's values during his childhood?
Ida Young served as the family's African-American cook and housekeeper during the first decade of his life. Vonnegut credited her with raising him and giving him decent moral instruction that remained an influence throughout his life.
Which novel made Kurt Vonnegut famous and when was it published?
Slaughterhouse-Five was released in 1969 after nearly twenty years of writing about his war experiences. The novel rocketed Kurt Vonnegut to fame and rose immediately to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list.
When did Kurt Vonnegut die and what were his final works?
Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 shortly before the publication of his final book A Man Without a Country which became a bestseller in 2005. His personal difficulties included depression and an attempted suicide in 1984.