VONNEGUT, Kurt, Jr.

(b. 11 November 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana), novelist and essayist whose offbeat characters and dark comedy echoed the disillusionment of a generation sullied by war, corporate greed, and government corruption, and who rose to prominence with the publication of Slaughterhouse-five (1969), a novel about the U.S. bombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II.

Vonnegut, the third child of Kurt Vonnegut, an architect, and Edith Lieber, a homemaker, began writing at Short-ridge High School (1936–1940), working as a columnist and editor for the Shortridge Daily Register. His journalistic interests continued at Cornell University (1940–1942) in Ithaca, New York, where he managed and wrote for the Cornell Sun while majoring in biochemistry. At Cornell, Vonnegut felt "marginal [and] somehow slightly off-balance all the time," a feeling he credits with making him a writer, and which led to his literary style that emerged in the 1960s. He did not graduate from Cornell.

Vonnegut served in the U.S. Army (infantry) during World War II and received the Purple Heart. Several events occurred during 1944 and 1945 that further shaped Vonnegut's writing and the direction of his life. In May 1944 his mother committed suicide. In December 1944 he was captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Dresden, Germany, where, on 13 February 1945 he survived the infamous fire-bombing of the city by Allied forces. The city was decimated in the attack—more than 50,000 civilians were killed—and Vonnegut's captors forced him to remove corpses from the resulting rubble. In May 1945 he was freed by Russian soldiers. Three months later, on 6 August, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in the deaths of more than 200,000 people. Much of Vonnegut's disillusionment with humanity and human systems—government, business, religion, science—is traceable to these early experiences. Vonnegut said of the Hiroshima bombing, "I was a great believer in truth, scientific truth, and then … truth was dropped on Hiroshima.… I was hid eously disappointed."

After the end of the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox on 1 September 1945, enrolled at the University of Chicago, and began working toward a master's degree in anthropology. He continued to write, taking a job as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. When his master's thesis was rejected by the university, Vonnegut took a job as a publicist for the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, to support his wife and two children, a son born in 1947 and a daughter born in 1949. He also began writing short stories. Vonnegut's first published story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," appeared in the 11 February 1950 edition of Colliers magazine; he vowed to quit his job at General Electric when he sold four or five more stories.

Writing turned out to be a lucrative enterprise, and Vonnegut soon moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to write full time. He published more than fifty short stories between 1950 and 1966. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952. The book, a postmodern version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), was dismissed by critics who categorized it as science fiction. It was reprinted in 1954, the year his second daughter was born, with the title Utopia 14. Between 1954 and 1956 Vonnegut worked a number of jobs to support his growing family while struggling to establish himself as a writer. He was employed at an automobile dealership and an advertising agency and also taught English. Meanwhile, he faced the death of more family members: his father died in 1957, and in 1958 his beloved sister died of cancer within twenty-four hours of her husband's death in a train accident. Vonnegut adopted three of their children.

After the publication of The Sirens of Titan in 1959, Vonnegut began to garner a cult following of hip, young readers in search of alternative literary works and writers. Baby boomers, who were center stage during the 1960s, found that Vonnegut's writings mirrored their own search for self apart from war, racism, sexism, capitalist greed, and corrupt politics. Vonnegut's prose, like his audience, was playfully irreverent, critical of corporate and political monoliths, fresh, innovative, funny, and intimately focused on the individual.

Vonnegut's early novels addressed issues similar to those reshaping U.S. culture in the 1960s. While America's youth rebelled against tradition and struggled to make sense of their lives and their world, Vonnegut published Mother Night (1962), a story of war-crime tribunals and fascism that questions our ability to distinguish good from evil; Cat's Cradle (1963), a story of worldwide apocalypse that critiques the indifference of science and the arbitrariness of religion; and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), a story of inherited wealth that exposes the absurdity of materialism and the inhumanity of greed. In particular, the publication of Cat's Cradle extended Vonnegut's appeal and helped to establish him as a major figure in American literature and the avuncular voice of a disillusioned generation.

By 1965 Vonnegut's reputation as a writer had grown enough for him to land a resident teaching position with the acclaimed writer's workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In 1967 he stopped teaching at Iowa and returned to Germany on a Guggenheim Fellowship to research a new book, Slaughterhouse-five. Published in 1969, the novel fuses a true accounting of Vonnegut's experiences in Dresden with the fantastic tale of a man who is kidnapped by aliens and becomes "unstuck in time." This story outlining the senselessness and unavoidability of war captivated popular audiences and gained critical attention, conflating the categories of literature and popular fiction. Laudatory reviews in the New York Times Book Review and other influential periodicals cemented Vonnegut's reputation as an important American author. According to Jerome Klinkowitz, an English professor and noted authority on Vonnegut's work, Slaughterhouse-five so "perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age." Ironically, Vonnegut at first thought the book was a failure, but in light of its warm reception he amended his opinion.

After the publication of Slaughterhouse-five, Vonnegut briefly taught creative writing at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked on Happy Birthday, Wanda June, a play based on Penelope, which he had written around 1960. Happy Birthday, Wanda June debuted on Broadway in March 1971, the same year the University of Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle as Vonnegut's long overdue thesis and awarded him a master's degree in anthropology. In 1972 Slaughterhouse-five was made into a popular movie, and Vonnegut's reputation grew. In 1973 he published Breakfast of Champions, his second most popular work, and became the distinguished professor of English prose at the City University of New York. He published two more novels and a collection of essays during the remainder of the 1970s, but none achieved the success and critical attention of his previous works. In 1979 Vonnegut divorced his first wife; he married the photographer Jill Krementz on 24 November 1979, and the couple adopted a daughter. In 1982 Vonnegut published Deadeye Dick. In 1984, suffering from severe depression, he attempted suicide with alcohol and sleeping pills.

Vonnegut's next three novels, Galápagos (1985), Blue-beard (1987), and Hocus Pocus (1990), recapture the insight of his work during the 1960s, but with an added maturity. During the 1980s and 1990s Vonnegut was frequently asked to comment on events in popular culture. As a spokesperson for the children of the 1960s, Vonnegut opposed government appropriation of the rights of the individual and was adamantly against nuclear proliferation. After Slaughterhouse-five was banned by a number of school libraries—and even burned at a school in Drake, North Dakota—Vonnegut became an unassuming voice for the First Amendment rights of individual expression, calling such acts of censorship "ignorant, dumb, superstitious … [and] cowardly."

Despite the dark and serious subject matter of his work, Vonnegut, like the audience that embraced him, never sacrificed his sense of humor. Although his works confront irresolvable issues about war, wealth, politics, bureaucracy, death, insanity, and identity in their search for humanity and basic decency, they are always witty and often hilarious. In the 1960s Vonnegut's literary technique challenged traditional forms and paralleled similar movements in art and music. Like the art of Andy Warhol and the music of the Beatles, his novels threw into question notions of high and low art. Vonnegut eventually became, in the fashion of Mark Twain, a gentleman of American letters, one whose perception of the human condition awes us in its concision and whose message for a disillusioned generation is simply to "respect one another." His writings repeatedly return to the same request: to behave with common courtesy, act humanely, and be kind to one another.

No book-length biographies of Vonnegut exist, but several of his works are autobiographical, such as Wampeters, Foma, andGranfalloons (1974), Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981), and Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (1991). Information about Vonnegut is also in Jerome Klinkowitz, The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change (1980), and William R. Allen, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (1988).

Kevin Alexander Boon