Author Biography- Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, in full Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (born November 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Indiana,
U.S.—died April 11, 2007, New York, New York), American writer noted for his wryly satirical
novels who frequently used postmodern techniques as well as elements of fantasy and science
fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization. Much of Vonnegut’s
work is marked by an essentially fatalistic worldview that nonetheless embraces modern
humanist beliefs.
Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect, was
unemployed during much of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Vonnegut wrote for his high
school newspaper, and he continued the activity at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York,
where he majored in biochemistry before leaving in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Air Force.
Captured by the Germans during World War II, he was one of the survivors of the firebombing
of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. After the war Vonnegut took graduate courses in
anthropology at the University of Chicago while working as a reporter. He was later employed as
a public relations writer in upstate New York, but his reservations about what he considered the
deceitfulness of the profession led him to pursue fiction writing full-time.
In the early 1950s Vonnegut began publishing short stories. Many of them were concerned with
technology and the future, which led some critics to classify Vonnegut as a science fiction writer,
though he resisted the label. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), elaborates on those themes,
visualizing a completely mechanized and automated society whose dehumanizing effects are
unsuccessfully resisted by the scientists and workers in a New York factory town. For his second
novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut imagined a scenario in which the entire history of
the human race is considered an accident attendant on an alien planet’s search for a spare part for
a spaceship.
Vonnegut abandoned science fiction tropes altogether in Mother Night (1961; film 1996), a
novel about an American playwright who serves as a spy in Nazi Germany. In Cat’s Cradle
(1963) some Caribbean islanders, who practice a religion consisting of harmless trivialities,
come into contact with a substance discovered by an atomic scientist that eventually destroys all
life on Earth. (In 1963 the University of Chicago granted Vonnegut a master’s degree in
anthropology after he submitted Cat’s Cradle as a thesis.) The novel was particularly significant
in its development of a slyly irreverent voice that constantly called attention to its own artifice; a
similar “metafictional” style would characterize much of Vonnegut’s subsquent work. God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) centres on the title character, an eccentric philanthropist, but also
introduces the writer Kilgore Trout, a fictional alter ego of Vonnegut who appears throughout his
oeuvre.
Although Vonnegut’s work had already gained a popular audience by the late 1960s, the
publication of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969; film 1972) cemented his
reputation. Explicitly drawing on his Dresden experience, Vonnegut crafted an absurdist
nonlinear narrative in which the bombing raid serves as a symbol of the cruelty and
destructiveness of war through the centuries. Critics lauded Slaughterhouse-Five as a modernday classic. Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973; film 1999)—about a
Midwestern businessman who becomes obsessed with Trout’s books—is a commentary on
writing, fame, and American social values, interspersed with drawings by Vonnegut. Though
reviews were mixed, it quickly became a best seller. Vonnegut’s next two novels were less
successful. Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More! (1976; film 1982) focuses on a pair of grotesque
siblings who devise a program to end loneliness, and Jailbird (1979) is a postmodern pastiche
rooted in 20th-century American social history.
While Vonnegut remained prolific throughout the 1980s, he struggled with depression and in
1984 attempted suicide. His later novels include Deadeye Dick (1982), which revisits characters
and settings from Breakfast of Champions; Galápagos (1985), a fantasy of human evolution told
from a detached future perspective; Bluebeard (1987), the fictional autobiography of an aging
painter; Hocus Pocus (1990), about a college professor turned prison warden; and Timequake
(1997), a loosely structured meditation on free will.
Vonnegut also wrote several plays, including Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970; film 1971);
several works of nonfiction, such as the collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974);
and several collections of short stories, chief among which was Welcome to the Monkey House
(1968). In 2005 he published A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s
America, a collection of essays and speeches inspired in part by contemporary politics.
Vonnegut’s posthumously published works include Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a
collection of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on war and peace, and a number of previously
unpublished short stories, assembled in Look at the Birdie (2009) and While Mortals Sleep
(2011). We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012) comprised an early unpublished novella and a
fragment of a novel unfinished at his death. A selection of his correspondence was published as
Letters (2012).
Vonnegut was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973. In
2010 the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library opened in Indianapolis. In addition to promoting the
work of Vonnegut, the nonprofit organization served as a cultural and educational resource
centre, including a museum, an art gallery, and a reading room