(no subject)
Personal Information: Born November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, IN; son of Kurt (an architect) and Edith Sophia (Lieber) Vonnegut; married Jane Marie Cox, September 1, 1945 (divorced, 1979); married Jill Krementz (a photographer), November, 1979; children: (first marriage) Mark, Edith, Nanette; (adopted deceased sister's children) James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; (second marriage) Lili (adopted). Education: Attended Cornell University, 1940-42, and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), 1943; attended University of Chicago, 1945-47, M.A., 1971. Avocational Interests: Painting, wood carving, welded sculpture. Memberships: Authors League of America, PEN (American Center; vice president, 1974--), National Institute of Arts and Letters, Delta Upsilon, Barnstable Yacht Club, Barnstable Comedy Club. Addresses: Home: Northampton, MA. Agent: Donald C. Farber, Esq., 460 Park Ave., 11th Floor, New York, NY 10022-1987.
As of 1977, Vonnegut's work includes eight novels, a play and a television play, two collections of short stories, a collection of essays, and a number of uncollected shorter pieces of fiction and nonfiction. He is himself the subject of a number of books, critical articles, theses, and dissertations, as well as many reviews, interviews, and features in the popular press. Although he began publishing in 1950, it was really in the 1960s that he made his impact. His immediate appeal was to youth, partly because he espoused pacifism in the era of the Vietnam War. Besides peace, Vonnegut speaks of everyone's need for treatment with decency, respect, and compassion in a lonely, incomprehensible world. While his plots often seem pessimistic they are nevertheless funny, and he has been called a Black Humorist. He also has been tagged a science-fiction writer, a satirist, and a surrealist, but perhaps he might better be seen as using all of these techniques.
The release of the film Slaughterhouse-Five in 1972 completed the emergence of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., from the obscurity of ten years before to a level of fame rivaled by few contemporary American authors. From 1950 to 1960 he remained virtually a literary unknown, despite stories in large circulation glossy magazines and two novels; from 1960 to 1970 his following swelled from a loyal but small "underground" coterie to a steadily expanding college-age audience to encompass finally a broad, heterogeneous, and perhaps truly national readership. Now it is accurate to speak of his appeal as international. That an international audience should develop is appropriate, for although in some ways, such as in his humor, he seems particularly American, and although he has been an astute observer and diagnostician of the American scene, Vonnegut's perspective remains essentially international. He makes it clear that he distrusts nationalism. He is the product of an era in which world war and nuclear explosion have made most parochial nationalism obsolete, in which humans have for the first time seen their own planet from space and recognized the imperative of mutual dependence. Yet Vonnegut's vision must surely be shaped by more humble influences. For, to return to Slaughterhouse-Five, the special anguish that Vonnegut felt over the firebombing of Dresden arose partly from his peculiar situation of being under attack by his own forces and sharing the sufferings of his "enemies," and in part from the fact that his own family was of German origin. Family remains an important concept for Vonnegut, from his assertion of the family's value for the individual, to his belief that we must all see ourselves as part of a larger human family. It is in family, then, that we can look for the beginnings of much that emerges later in his fiction.
Though Kurt Vonnegut had been a widely read short-story writer throughout the 1950s and though his novels had developed a cult following in the 1960s, it was in 1970, when his novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969) caught the mood of a country disillusioned with the Vietnam War, that he achieved widespread acclaim. Since then his earlier novels have been studied with increased attention, while his steady production has continued to keep his name before the public. Besides his popularity in the United States, Vonnegut's work has been widely translated, achieving particular success in Britain, Germany, and Russia. All fourteen of his novels remain in print, a remarkable feat considering that they cover a career of some forty-five years. The novels and short stories continue to be adapted for film, television, and theater. His nonfiction works - including Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (Opinions) (1974), Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981), and Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (1991) - underline his role as an American literary icon and respected social observer, and he frequently is sought out for speeches, interviews, and commentary.
Vonnegut has come to be recognized as a thoughtful social critic who ponders the impact of technology, science, and social behavior. A skeptical observer with a light touch, he charms and amuses readers with his humor and irreverence while unflinchingly exposing the foibles of society. The technique in much of his work may be characterized as postmodern; rather than revering classical prose models, it instead uses choppy, vernacular sentences and deemphasizes traditional conventions of plot, theme, time, and character development. Like postmodern buildings, which may unite the architecture of disparate styles and eras, his novels combine comedy with pathos, fantasy with history, and didacticism with farce. Such forms as poetry, science fiction, satire, drama, graffiti, lyrics, drawings, and even recipes appear in the novels. They deconstruct the social myths on which society often thoughtlessly runs and repeatedly defamiliarize the commonplace daily world to make their audience reexamine its habits of thinking. Vonnegut cuts quickly to the issue, actions are reported succinctly, and the prose is geared toward moving the story along and holding the reader's attention. His style, conspicuous for its short sentences and paragraphs, owes much to his background in journalism. As a satirist he acknowledges his debt to Voltaire and Jonathan Swift, while his brand of humor is influenced by Mark Twain and comedians such as Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, and Bob and Ray. Vonnegut's enduring themes - social injustice, economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and militaristic barbarity - spring from his experiences growing up in the Depression and surviving World War II. Through his usually damaged, faltering antiheroes his stories search for what gives life meaning in a society bereft of cultural certainties
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on 11 November 1922. His forebears came to the United States as part of the heavy wave of German immigration of the mid nineteenth century, two of his great-grandfathers - Clemens Vonnegut Sr. and Peter Lieber - arriving in 1848. They both eventually found their way to Indianapolis, where Lieber bought into a brewery in the 1860s and with a combination of business acumen and political awareness made his fortune. By the end of the century he had retired in style to Germany, leaving his son, Albert, to run the brewery and to indulge his extravagant tastes. Meanwhile, Clemens Vonnegut's son, Bernard, had become an architect, as did in turn his son Kurt. They were cultured men who revered the arts, especially poetry and music.
Anti-German sentiment after World War I and the general erosion of distinctions of place and heritage in an increasingly mobile, homogenized America contributed to the cultural decline of German American society in Indianapolis. Financial blows also fell. Prohibition ended the Lieber income from brewing, and the Depression brought a halt to building and hence unemployment to Vonnegut's architect father. Looking back on those years Vonnegut has said that during the Depression his family never went hungry, and although they moved to a new, somewhat smaller house, designed by his father, their lifestyle was not crimped. But his father found no work for ten years and became increasingly withdrawn and tentative. The experience was something Vonnegut seems never to have forgotten, and his fiction abounds with characters who fall into self-doubt when they lose productive social roles. The strains on Edith Vonnegut were also considerable, and she perhaps felt the family's financial decline most acutely, having known her flamboyant father's lifestyle before the war. With the goal of bringing in money, Edith began taking writing courses in an attempt to become a short-story writer. None of her stories was published, but her attempt seems to have made an impression on her younger son.
In 1944 Vonnegut was sent to Europe and shortly thereafter was captured during the famous Battle of the Bulge of December 1944, becoming a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. He survived the firebombing of Dresden on the night of 13 February 1945 in an underground meat-storage cellar used as an air-raid shelter, emerging the next morning to find only smoking ruins. For the next several days he and other prisoners were employed pulling corpses from the debris and cremating them. These events became the basis of his best-known novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. In April 1945 Russian troops occupied Dresden, and he was liberated.
In 1947 Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, to work as a public-relations writer for General Electric, where his brother, Bernard, already worked as a scientist. The job, the plant, the town, and the people he encountered there provided settings, characters, and situations for many of his stories. Initially, though, the job provided well-paid employment that enabled him to draw on both his journalistic experience and the scientific emphasis of his education. These elements combined when he began writing fiction. Many of his colleagues from the public-relations department at General Electric would describe how they aspired to become writers, but Vonnegut dedicated long hours after work and on weekends to his writing. The bombing of Dresden was the subject about which he felt compelled to write, but finding the form through which to approach it proved difficult. It was to be twenty years before he actually came to it
As of 1977, Vonnegut's work includes eight novels, a play and a television play, two collections of short stories, a collection of essays, and a number of uncollected shorter pieces of fiction and nonfiction. He is himself the subject of a number of books, critical articles, theses, and dissertations, as well as many reviews, interviews, and features in the popular press. Although he began publishing in 1950, it was really in the 1960s that he made his impact. His immediate appeal was to youth, partly because he espoused pacifism in the era of the Vietnam War. Besides peace, Vonnegut speaks of everyone's need for treatment with decency, respect, and compassion in a lonely, incomprehensible world. While his plots often seem pessimistic they are nevertheless funny, and he has been called a Black Humorist. He also has been tagged a science-fiction writer, a satirist, and a surrealist, but perhaps he might better be seen as using all of these techniques.
The release of the film Slaughterhouse-Five in 1972 completed the emergence of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., from the obscurity of ten years before to a level of fame rivaled by few contemporary American authors. From 1950 to 1960 he remained virtually a literary unknown, despite stories in large circulation glossy magazines and two novels; from 1960 to 1970 his following swelled from a loyal but small "underground" coterie to a steadily expanding college-age audience to encompass finally a broad, heterogeneous, and perhaps truly national readership. Now it is accurate to speak of his appeal as international. That an international audience should develop is appropriate, for although in some ways, such as in his humor, he seems particularly American, and although he has been an astute observer and diagnostician of the American scene, Vonnegut's perspective remains essentially international. He makes it clear that he distrusts nationalism. He is the product of an era in which world war and nuclear explosion have made most parochial nationalism obsolete, in which humans have for the first time seen their own planet from space and recognized the imperative of mutual dependence. Yet Vonnegut's vision must surely be shaped by more humble influences. For, to return to Slaughterhouse-Five, the special anguish that Vonnegut felt over the firebombing of Dresden arose partly from his peculiar situation of being under attack by his own forces and sharing the sufferings of his "enemies," and in part from the fact that his own family was of German origin. Family remains an important concept for Vonnegut, from his assertion of the family's value for the individual, to his belief that we must all see ourselves as part of a larger human family. It is in family, then, that we can look for the beginnings of much that emerges later in his fiction.
Though Kurt Vonnegut had been a widely read short-story writer throughout the 1950s and though his novels had developed a cult following in the 1960s, it was in 1970, when his novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969) caught the mood of a country disillusioned with the Vietnam War, that he achieved widespread acclaim. Since then his earlier novels have been studied with increased attention, while his steady production has continued to keep his name before the public. Besides his popularity in the United States, Vonnegut's work has been widely translated, achieving particular success in Britain, Germany, and Russia. All fourteen of his novels remain in print, a remarkable feat considering that they cover a career of some forty-five years. The novels and short stories continue to be adapted for film, television, and theater. His nonfiction works - including Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (Opinions) (1974), Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981), and Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (1991) - underline his role as an American literary icon and respected social observer, and he frequently is sought out for speeches, interviews, and commentary.
Vonnegut has come to be recognized as a thoughtful social critic who ponders the impact of technology, science, and social behavior. A skeptical observer with a light touch, he charms and amuses readers with his humor and irreverence while unflinchingly exposing the foibles of society. The technique in much of his work may be characterized as postmodern; rather than revering classical prose models, it instead uses choppy, vernacular sentences and deemphasizes traditional conventions of plot, theme, time, and character development. Like postmodern buildings, which may unite the architecture of disparate styles and eras, his novels combine comedy with pathos, fantasy with history, and didacticism with farce. Such forms as poetry, science fiction, satire, drama, graffiti, lyrics, drawings, and even recipes appear in the novels. They deconstruct the social myths on which society often thoughtlessly runs and repeatedly defamiliarize the commonplace daily world to make their audience reexamine its habits of thinking. Vonnegut cuts quickly to the issue, actions are reported succinctly, and the prose is geared toward moving the story along and holding the reader's attention. His style, conspicuous for its short sentences and paragraphs, owes much to his background in journalism. As a satirist he acknowledges his debt to Voltaire and Jonathan Swift, while his brand of humor is influenced by Mark Twain and comedians such as Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, and Bob and Ray. Vonnegut's enduring themes - social injustice, economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and militaristic barbarity - spring from his experiences growing up in the Depression and surviving World War II. Through his usually damaged, faltering antiheroes his stories search for what gives life meaning in a society bereft of cultural certainties
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on 11 November 1922. His forebears came to the United States as part of the heavy wave of German immigration of the mid nineteenth century, two of his great-grandfathers - Clemens Vonnegut Sr. and Peter Lieber - arriving in 1848. They both eventually found their way to Indianapolis, where Lieber bought into a brewery in the 1860s and with a combination of business acumen and political awareness made his fortune. By the end of the century he had retired in style to Germany, leaving his son, Albert, to run the brewery and to indulge his extravagant tastes. Meanwhile, Clemens Vonnegut's son, Bernard, had become an architect, as did in turn his son Kurt. They were cultured men who revered the arts, especially poetry and music.
Anti-German sentiment after World War I and the general erosion of distinctions of place and heritage in an increasingly mobile, homogenized America contributed to the cultural decline of German American society in Indianapolis. Financial blows also fell. Prohibition ended the Lieber income from brewing, and the Depression brought a halt to building and hence unemployment to Vonnegut's architect father. Looking back on those years Vonnegut has said that during the Depression his family never went hungry, and although they moved to a new, somewhat smaller house, designed by his father, their lifestyle was not crimped. But his father found no work for ten years and became increasingly withdrawn and tentative. The experience was something Vonnegut seems never to have forgotten, and his fiction abounds with characters who fall into self-doubt when they lose productive social roles. The strains on Edith Vonnegut were also considerable, and she perhaps felt the family's financial decline most acutely, having known her flamboyant father's lifestyle before the war. With the goal of bringing in money, Edith began taking writing courses in an attempt to become a short-story writer. None of her stories was published, but her attempt seems to have made an impression on her younger son.
In 1944 Vonnegut was sent to Europe and shortly thereafter was captured during the famous Battle of the Bulge of December 1944, becoming a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. He survived the firebombing of Dresden on the night of 13 February 1945 in an underground meat-storage cellar used as an air-raid shelter, emerging the next morning to find only smoking ruins. For the next several days he and other prisoners were employed pulling corpses from the debris and cremating them. These events became the basis of his best-known novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. In April 1945 Russian troops occupied Dresden, and he was liberated.
In 1947 Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, to work as a public-relations writer for General Electric, where his brother, Bernard, already worked as a scientist. The job, the plant, the town, and the people he encountered there provided settings, characters, and situations for many of his stories. Initially, though, the job provided well-paid employment that enabled him to draw on both his journalistic experience and the scientific emphasis of his education. These elements combined when he began writing fiction. Many of his colleagues from the public-relations department at General Electric would describe how they aspired to become writers, but Vonnegut dedicated long hours after work and on weekends to his writing. The bombing of Dresden was the subject about which he felt compelled to write, but finding the form through which to approach it proved difficult. It was to be twenty years before he actually came to it