 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11,
2007) was an American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy,
and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963),
and Breakfast of Champions (1973). Vonnegut is a author of at least 19 novels,
many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays,
he relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting
audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against
the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
Early Years
Kurt Vonnegut was born to third-generation German-American parents in
Indianapolis, Indiana. As a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,
Vonnegut worked on the nation's first daily high school newspaper, The Daily
Echo. He briefly attended Butler University but dropped out when a professor
said his stories were not good enough. He attended Cornell University from 1941
to 1942, where he served as assistant managing editor and associate editor for
the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, and majored in biochemistry. While
attending Cornell, he was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, following in
the footsteps of his father. Nevertheless, Vonnegut often spoke and wrote about
The Sun being the only enjoyable part of his time at Cornell. He enrolled at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1943. He
studied there only briefly before enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War
II. On May 14, 1944, Mothers' Day, his mother, Edith Lieber Vonnegut, committed
suicide.
World War II and The Firebombing of Dresden
Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence
on his later work. As an advance scout with the U.S. 106th Infantry Division
during the Battle of the Bulge, Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion and
wandered alone behind enemy lines for several days until captured by German
troops on December 14, 1944. While a prisoner of war, Vonnegut witnessed the
aftermath of the February 13–15, 1945 bombing of Dresden, Germany, which
destroyed much of the city. Vonnegut was one of just seven American prisoners of
war in Dresden to survive, in an underground meatpacking cellar known as
Slaughterhouse Five. "Utter destruction," he recalled. "Carnage unfathomable."
The Nazis put him to work gathering bodies for mass burial, Vonnegut explains.
"But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in guys with
flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes." This
experience formed the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five and is a
theme in at least six other books.
Vonnegut was freed by Soviet troops in May 1945. Upon returning to America,
Vonnegut was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible
wound."
Post-war Career
After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student
in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of
Chicago. According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his
first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist
painting and Native American uprisings of the late 19th century, saying it was
"unprofessional." They later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle and awarded him the
degree. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations
for General Electric. He attributes his unadorned writing style to his earlier
reporting work.
On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the
University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there Cat's Cradle became a
best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best
American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time
magazine and the Modern Library.
Early in his adult life, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape
Cod.
Personal Life and Death
He married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, after returning from World
War II, but the couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but
from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife,
photographer Jill Krementz. Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce
from Cox was finalized.
He had seven children: he shared three with his first wife, adopted his sister
Alice's three children when she died of cancer, and adopted another child, Lily.
Two of these children have published books, including his only biological son,
Mark Vonnegut, who wrote The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, about his
experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery;
the tendency to insanity he acknowledged may be partly hereditary, influencing
him to take up the study of medicine and orthomolecular psychiatry. Mark was
named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint, and to whom
he bears some resemblance, in both style and appearance.
His daughter Edith Vonnegut, an artist, has also had her work published in a
book entitled Domestic Goddesses. Edith was once married to Geraldo Rivera. She
was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. His youngest daughter is
Nanette, named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother.
Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven and
Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James,
Steven and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their
father was killed when his commuter train went off an open drawbridge in New
Jersey, and their mother — Kurt's sister Alice — died of cancer. In Slapstick,
or Lonesome No More!, Kurt recounts that Alice's husband died two days before
Alice herself. Her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found
out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News, a day
before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went
to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama as an infant.
Lily is a singer and actress.
On January 31, 2000, a fire destroyed the top story of his home. Vonnegut
suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized in critical condition for four
days. He survived, but his personal archives were destroyed. After leaving the
hospital, he recuperated in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, New York, after
a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks prior resulted in irreversible brain
injuries.
|
