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Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (born November 11, 1922) is 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).

Education and early years

As a high-schooler at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis[1], 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 1943, where he served as an opinions section editor for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, and majored in chemistry before joining the U.S. Army during World War II. While attending Cornell University he was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, following in the footsteps of his father. His experiences as an advance scout with the U.S. 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge and as a Prisoner of War earned him a Purple Heart and have influenced much of his work.

While a Prisoner of War, Vonnegut witnessed the aftermath of the 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 recalls. "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." [2] This experience formed the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five and is a theme in at least six other books.[2]

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."[3] 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.[citation needed]

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 widely regarded as one of the most significant works of American fiction in the 20th century.[citation needed]

Early in his adult life, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, in the Cape Cod area. [4]

Writing career

His first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" appeared in 1950 in Collier's. His first novel was the dystopian science fiction novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write science fiction short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959. Through the 1960s the form of his work changed, from the orthodox science fiction of Cat's Cradle (which in 1971 got him his master's degree) to the acclaimed, semiautobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device.

These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which included many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself, as a deus ex machina.

"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.
"I know," I said.
"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.
"I know," I said.

Vonnegut's mother committed suicide while he was in his early twenties. He himself attempted suicide in 1985 and later wrote about this in several essays.

Breakfast of Champions became one of his best sellers. It includes, beyond the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.

In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine, said to be a new form of ice with a different crystal structure from normal ice. When a crystal of ice-nine is brought into contact with liquid water, it becomes a seed that 'teaches' the molecules of liquid water to arrange themselves into ice-nine. However, this process is not easily reversible, as the melting point of ice-nine is 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit (45.8 degrees Celsius).

Although many of his later novels involved science fiction themes, they were widely read and reviewed outside the field, not least due to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, his seminal short story Harrison Bergeron graphically demonstrates how even the debatably noble sentiment of egalitarianism, when combined with too much authority, becomes horrific repression.

In much of his work Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author Kilgore Trout (based on real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon), characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism. In the foreword to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut wrote that as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia, and it struck him that these men walked like broken machines; it followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless prisoners of determinism. Vonnegut also explored this theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim "has come unstuck in time" and has so little control over his own life that he cannot even predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute.

With the publication of his novel Timequake, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He currently writes for the magazine In These Times, focusing on subjects ranging from contemptuous criticism of President George W. Bush's administration to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book entitled A Man Without A Country.

An August, 2006 article reported:

He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today - or so he claims. "I've given up on it ... It won't happen. ... The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"[2]

Personal life

Vonnegut was born to third-generation German-American parents in Indianapolis, Indiana.

He married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, after returning from the war, but the couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 to 2000, Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz.[5]

He has seven children: three he shared with his first wife, three he adopted when his sister Alice died of cancer, and an adopted daughter 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 facial appearance.[6] [7]

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.

He is the younger brother of atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, now deceased.

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.[8] 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 currently lives with his second wife and his dog Flour in his old townhouse in New York City.

Politics

Vonnegut is a humanist; he currently serves as Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having replaced Isaac Asimov in what Vonnegut calls "that totally functionless capacity". He was deeply influenced by early socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quotes them in his work. He is a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and was featured in a print advertisement for them.

Walter Starbuck, the main character of his novel Jailbird, was a minor bureaucrat in the Nixon administration who found himself swept up in the Watergate scandal. Otherwise, while he frequently addressed moral and political issues, Vonnegut rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.

With his columns for In These Times, he began a blistering attack on the administration of President George W. Bush and the Iraq war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."[9]

In A Man Without a Country, he wrote that "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."[10]

In 2005 Vonnegut was interviewed by David Neson for The Australian.[11] During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble - sweet and honourable I guess it is - to die for what you believe in." (This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ["it is sweet and appropriate to die for your country"] from Horace's Odes, or possibly from Wilfred Owen's ironic use of the line in his Dulce Et Decorum Est.) David Neson took offense to Vonnegut's comments and characterized him as an old man who "doesn't want to live any more ... and because he can't find anything worthwhile to keep him alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing." Vonnegut's son, Dr. Mark Vonnegut responded to the article by writing an editorial to the Boston Globe in which he explained the reasons behind his father's "provocative posturing" and stated that "If these commentators can so badly misunderstand and underestimate an utterly unguarded English-speaking 83-year-old man with an extensive public record of exactly what he thinks, maybe we should worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."[12]

A 2006 interview with Rolling Stone magazine stated, " ... it's not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. 'Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,' Vonnegut laments. 'Bush is so ignorant.' "[2]

Design career

Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for Slaughterhouse-Five and developed with Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations, such as sphincters, and other, less indelicate images. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III.

More recently, Vonnegut participated in the project The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, where he created an album cover for Phish called Hook, Line and Sinker, which has been included in a traveling exhibition for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Pop culture trivia

In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer aping the style of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This action caused some confusion amongst readers.

According to a 1996 online interview[13], Vonnegut said he had "sold the [film] rights to Cat's Cradle outright and for all eternity to Hilly Elkins, who has never done anything with it and never will and won't sell it back. Cat's Cradle now lies at a crossroads with a stake through its heart." As of 2006, Cat's Cradle is in production, with Hilly Elkins and Leonardo DiCaprio as producers and screenplay by Jim V. Hart and Jake Hart, with release scheduled for 2007.[14] Vonnegut also said, "Jerry Garcia had the rights to Sirens of Titan for many years. When he died, we bought the rights back from his estate. Player Piano was bought outright by Ed Pressman quite a while ago. We've been talking to him, asking him to do something with it or let us have it back."[citation needed]

Vonnegut's couplet from Cat's Cradle, "Nice, Nice, Very Nice.." was put to music by the Southern California progressive rock group Ambrosia and recorded on their self-titled debut album (1975). Vonnegut heard the song in NYC while visiting his daughter and immediately wrote a letter to the band, saying, "And I myself am crazy about our song, of course, but what do I know and why wouldn't I be? This much I have always known, anyway: Music is the only art that's really worth a damn. I envy you guys." (from: liner notes of Ambrosia Anthology, 1997)

In 2000, Vonnegut recited his lyrics from "Cat's Cradle" for "Ice-9 Ballads", a song cycle for chamber orchestra with narrator composed by Dave Soldier and premiered and recorded (released in 2001) by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra conducted by Richard Auldon Clark. In 2002, the same collaborators created a 1940's-style radio play, "A Soldier's Story" based on the execution of the American Private Eddie Slovik in World War II. Vonnegut originally wrote the script as a substitute for the original text by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz for Stravinsky's "Histoire du Soldat", but agreed to present it in an alternate musical form that was contemporary to the story. The work was premiered at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City in June, 2002. Vonnegut plays the major speaking role, the General, on the recording, released in 2005.

Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in 1986's Back To School, in which he is hired by Thornton Melon to write a paper on the topic of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Recognizing the work as not Melon's own, Professor Turner tells him, "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."

Vonnegut is also invoked as a pop culture reference in many teen flicks such as Can't Hardly Wait, in which the character Preston (Ethan Embry) is bound for Massachusetts to attend a writing seminar by the acclaimed author, and Varsity Blues, where James Van Der Beek's character is caught reading a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five hidden inside the playbook. The espionage thriller The Recruit is packed with Vonnegut references. Characters are seen reading Vonnegut titles, the Al Pacino character recommends and quotes Vonnegut, and the virus which forms the central object of the plot is called 'Ice-9' with explanatory reference made to Cat's Cradle.

Vonnegut himself appears briefly in Keith Gordon's film of his novel Mother Night and as a TV commercial director in the film version of Breakfast of Champions.

Vonnegut has given commencement addresses at Southampton College (in 1981), Syracuse University (in 1984), Rice University (in 1998), and Agnes Scott College (in 1999)[15]. There was a widely-circulated urban legend on the Internet that he gave a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 in which he issued simple advice, most notably advising students to "wear sunscreen". In fact, the commencement speaker at MIT in 1997 was Kofi Annan and the supposed Vonnegut speech was an article published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997 by columnist Mary Schmich. The premise of the Schmich column was used as the basis for a novelty pop song by Baz Luhrmann in 1999.

One episode of the TV sitcom Frasier features a meat-basket called 'the slaughterhouse five'. The title-card for the scene is "With Apologies to Mr. Vonnegut".

The band mewithoutYou took the title of their song "Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt" from a Vonnegut quote which appears in his books Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The Buffalo, NY hardcore band Snapcase has a song on their CD Progression Through Unlearning called "Harrison Bergeron" in honor of the short story. Canadian band Alexisonfire titled one of their songs "Happiness by the Kilowatt" a reference to Vonnegut's short story "The Euphio Question". Alexisonfire's singer Dallas Green also plays in a solo acoustic act called City and Colour where he titled one of his songs "In the Water, I am Beautiful" another Vonnegut reference.

Other trivia

References and footnotes

  1. ^ http://www.indianahistory.org/library/manuscripts/collection_guides/m0482.html
  2. ^ a b c d http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11123162/kurt_vonnegut_says_this_is_the_end_of_the_world
  3. ^ They later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle and awarded him the degree.
  4. ^ http://www.vonnegutweb.com/collections/wttmh_times.html
  5. ^ Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.
  6. ^ http://www.news.wisc.edu/4371.html
  7. ^ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051011/VONNEGUT11/TPEntertainment/TopStories
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/733/
  10. ^ http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1546/
  11. ^ http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17256664%255E16947,00.html
  12. ^ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/27/twisting_vonneguts_views_on_terrorism/
  13. ^ A transcript of an AOL online interview from November 22, 1996, done by Jesse Kornbluth and Robert B. Weide
  14. ^ Cat's Cradle at IMDb
  15. ^ http://www.vonnegutweb.com/vonnegutia/commencement/index.html
  16. ^ http://www.vonnegutweb.com/vonnegutia/interviews/int_heller.html
  17. ^ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1702180,00.html
  18. ^ http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1726/
  19. ^ http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=25399
  20. ^ http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2006/1326
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