Kurt Vonnegut, an American novelist and short story writer, died on April 11, 2007 at the age of 87, of complications from a fall.
His satiric, whimsical, and darkly humorous novels appealed to the cynical outlook of a generation of American youth who came of age during the Vietnam Conflict of the mid-1960s to early 1970s in America. His 14 novels have been staples of college reading lists on the Modern American Novel for decades. Their themes relate to the insanity of war, the innate cruelty of human beings to each other, the tragedy and absurdity of existence, and the dehumanizing effects of technology, as well as materialism, environmental pollution, and other aspects of modern life.
Kurt Vonnegut was born November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of an architect. He studied biochemistry at Cornell University, later transferring to the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Soon after arriving at the Carnegie Institute, he was inducted into the Army and sent to Germany as a combat scout with the 106th Infantry Division. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he was sent to Dresden as a German prisoner of war and assigned to a work group. He arrived in Dresden in time to experience the firebombing of that city on February 13, 1945, and his work group was forced to recover bodies after the bombing. This experience became the subject of his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam Conflict.
After discharge from the Army, Vonnegut resumed studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago, and worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Times. Leaving Chicago without a degree, he worked for three years in public relations for General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. He quit to become a freelance writer in 1950. During the 1950s he sold short stories to a number of magazines.
His first novel was Player Piano, published in 1952. Cat’s Cradle (1963) brought his work to the attention of a wider public and his first critical recognition. Most of his novels were written between 1961 and 1973, after which he spent more time lecturing, teaching, and writing articles and essays. He also wrote columns for the political journal In These Times.
The significance of Kurt Vonnegut and later writers who
became popular with disaffected youth in the 1960’s
and 1970’s such as Richard Brautigan and Jerzy Kosinski
is that they led a shift in literary taste and attracted
a new reading public.
Web Sites
- International Herald Tribune
- Kurt Vonnegut Web (unauthorized)
- In These Times
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