Vonnegut+Biography

Early years
Kurt Vonnegut was born to fourth-generation [|German-American] parents, son and grandson of architects in the Indianapolis firm Vonnegut & Bohn. As a student at [|Shortridge High School] in [|Indianapolis],[|[3]] Vonnegut worked on the nation's first daily high school newspaper, //The Daily Echo//. 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. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The army sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now [|Carnegie Mellon University]) and the [|University of Tennessee] to study mechanical engineering.[|[2]] On [|May 14], [|1944], [|Mothers' Day], his mother, Edith Lieber Vonnegut, committed [|suicide].[|[4]]

World War II and the firebombing of Dresden
Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and [|prisoner of war] had a profound influence on his later work. As a Corporal with the [|106th Infantry Division], Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion and wandered alone behind enemy lines for several days until captured by [|Wehrmacht] troops on [|December 14], [|1944]. Imprisoned in [|Dresden], Vonnegut witnessed the [|fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945], which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of just seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive, in their cell in an underground meat locker of a plant known as //Schlachthof Fünf// ([|Slaughterhouse] Five). "Utter destruction", he recalled, "carnage unfathomable." The Germans put him to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with [|flamethrowers]. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes." This experience formed the core of one of his most famous works, //[|Slaughterhouse-Five]//, and is a theme in at least six other books. Vonnegut was freed by [|Red Army] troops in May 1945. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a [|Purple Heart] for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound," later writing in //[|Timequake]// that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "[|frostbite]."

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] painters and the leaders of late 19th century [|Native American] uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work in [|Schenectady], [|New York], in [|public relations] for [|General Electric]. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel //[|Cat's Cradle]// as his thesis, citing its anthropological content and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971. 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
The author was known as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., until his father's death in October 1957; after that he was known simply as Kurt Vonnegut. He was also the younger brother of [|Bernard Vonnegut], an atmospheric scientist who discovered that [|silver iodide] could be used for [|cloud seeding], the process of artificial stimulation of rain. 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: three with his first wife, three more born to his sister Alice and adopted by Vonnegut after she died of [|cancer], and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. 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].



His daughter [|Edith] ("Edie"), an artist, has also had her work published in a book titled //Domestic Goddesses//. She was once married to journalist [|Geraldo Rivera] and was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. His youngest daughter is Nanette ("Nanny"), named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior and is the subject of several of his paintings, notably "Nanny and Rose". 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!]//, Vonnegut 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] of 2001, a fire destroyed the top story of Vonnegut's home. He 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 reportedly smoked [|Pall Mall] [|cigarettes], unfiltered, which he claimed is a "classy way to commit suicide."

Death
Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on [|April 11], [|2007], in [|Manhattan] after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks prior resulted in irreversible [|brain injuries]. 

Writing career
Vonnegut's first short story, "[|Report on the Barnhouse Effect]" appeared in 1950 in //[|Collier's]//. His first novel was the [|dystopian] novel //[|Player Piano]// (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write 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 relatively orthodox structure of //[|Cat's Cradle]// (which in 1971 earned him a [|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 attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays.[|[20]] // Breakfast of Champions // became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author [|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] (a central [|wampeter] in his novel //[|Cat's Cradle]//), 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. This process is not easily reversible, however, as the [|melting point] of ice-nine is 114.4 degrees [|Fahrenheit] (45.8 degrees [|Celsius]). [|Metaphorically], ice-nine represents any potentially lethal invention created without regard for the consequences. Ice-nine is patently dangerous, as even a small piece of it dropped in the ocean would cause all the earth's water to solidify. Yet it //was// created, simply because human beings like to create and invent. Although many of his 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 an [|ethos] like [|egalitarianism], when combined with too much authority, engenders horrific repression. In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of 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. Vonnegut's well-known phrase "So it goes", used ironically in reference to death, also originated in //Slaughterhouse-Five// and became a slogan for anti-[|Vietnam War] protestors in the 1960s. Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the "Vonnegut vein." With the publication of his novel //[|Timequake]// in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine //[|In These Times]//, where he was a senior editor, until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U.S. politics 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 titled //[|A Man Without a Country]//, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters. His “trip to the post office” is a Vonnegut-style discourse on what is lost by a hermetically-isolated click of [send] on an e-mail. In a Luddite mourning over the death of the typewriter, he describes - at chapter length - the process of sending pages to his typist. How he first visits his local newsstand and stands in line, interacting and observing people, making conversation.

Politics
Vonnegut was a [|Humanist]. He served as Honorary President of the [|American Humanist Association], having replaced [|Isaac Asimov] in what Vonnegut called "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 named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in //Hocus Pocus//) and Russian [|Communist] leader [|Leon Trotsky] (Leon Trotsky Trout in //Galápagos//). He was a lifetime member of the [|American Civil Liberties Union] and was featured in a print advertisement for them. Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. (Although the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor [|Nixon] administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in //[|Jailbird]// (1979), would not have occurred but for the [|Watergate scandal], the focus is not on the administration.) 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 [|Bush administration] 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]." //[|In These Times]// quoted him as saying "The only difference between [|Hitler] and [|Bush] is that Hitler was elected."[|[23]] 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."[|[25]]

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for //[|The Australian]//. 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 to [|Wilfred Owen]'s ironic use of the line in his //[|Dulce Et Decorum Est]//.) Nason took offense at 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, Mark, 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 saying exactly what he thinks, maybe we should worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."[|[26]] A 2006 interview with //[|Rolling Stone]// 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.' "[|[6]]

Religion
In the semi-autobiographical novel //[|Timequake]//, Vonnegut says: "He [my great-grandfather] was a [|Freethinker], which is to say a skeptic about conventional religious beliefs, as had been [|Voltaire] and [|Thomas Jefferson] and [|Benjamin Franklin] and so on. And as would be Kilgore Trout and I."