Self-portrait © Kurt Vonnegut, used by permission.
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922, to Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and Edith Vonnegut, a highly successful upper-middle class family. Vonnegut’s mother had inherited a brewery, and his father was an architect in Indianapolis, whose buildings included the All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis, the signature Art Deco buildings for Indiana Bell, new buildings for Hooks Drugstores prior to World War II, and the Anderson Bank building in Anderson. He also created the original logo for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Unfortunately, the Depression brought financial hardship to the Vonnegut household. The brewery went bankrupt, and Vonnegut’s father found himself unemployed. The younger Vonnegut never forgot this hardship, and his fiction abounds with characters who fall into self-doubt when they lose productive social roles.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. graduated from Shortridge High School, where he was an active member of the school newspaper. Later, his interest in journalism led to writing for the Cornell University Sun, where he wrote against American involvement in the European war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, however, he enlisted in the Army. In 1944, Vonnegut was sent to Europe and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. As a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, Vonnegut endured and survived the Allied firebombing of that city in February 1945, sheltered in an underground meat locker. He remained a prisoner of war until April when the Soviet army occupied the remains of Dresden.
Vonnegut returned to Indianapolis with the Purple Heart and shortly afterwards moved to Chicago, where he worked for the Chicago News Bureau and pursued graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago. When his faculty rejected his master’s thesis, Vonnegut felt he had little choice but to withdraw from school.
In 1947, Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, as a public-relations writer for General Electric. While he worked a fifty-hour week, he used his free hours to write short stories. This persistence paid off in 1949, when his first story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” was accepted by Collier’s. Following the story’s publication, Vonnegut left General Electric and wrote full time. Within a year, he had stories published in Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Ladies' Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post—the major general interest magazines of the time.
Vonnegut began to write science fiction novels in the early 1950s. Player Piano was published by Scribner’s in 1952, and Dell published a paperback of his next novel The Sirens of Titan in 1959. While both books were successful (Sirens was reissued as a hardcover in 1961), Vonnegut was concerned that he was only regarded as a science fiction writer. He decided to explore new territory with his writing and attended the acclaimed Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he worked on his next novel, 1962’s Mother Night, the story of an American playwright who doubles as a spy in Germany during World War II. Vonnegut’s wartime experiences clearly informed the issues raised in this novel.
In 1963, Vonnegut published Cat's Cradle, a novel that marked a new approach in his writing. Cat’s Cradle’s narration—with its many chapters, satiric epigraphs, and fragmentary paragraphs—is an amusing parody of the novel form, and with its publication Vonnegut began to build his reputation as a serious writer of fiction.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) was Vonnegut’s first widely reviewed book, and with wider recognition, his fortunes began to rise. Dell reissued Cat's Cradle in September 1965 with a printing of 150,000. Through translations, his novels were reaching a wider audience throughout the world. In 1967 Vonnegut received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Dresden and gather material for a new novel based on his experiences as a prisoner of war. This trip became the impetus for Vonnegut’s most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five.
The first printing of Slaughterhouse Five in March 1969 sold ten thousand copies and took first place on the New York Times best seller list. The first Delta paperback printing a year later sold twenty-five thousand copies. By 1970, Universal Pictures adapted the book for a highly successful film directed by George Roy Hill. Vonnegut found himself famous, prosperous, and something of a guru figure to the Woodstock generation. He also enjoyed wide acceptance in academe. His books appeared on reading lists of college classes throughout America, and Vonnegut received honorary degrees from universities (among them, Indiana University), was appointed Distinguished Professor of English Prose by the City University of New York, and was elected vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Pleased with the success of his novels and the film of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut spoke of being “through with novels,” and dreamed of a future of "plays from now on.” He revised Penelope, a 15-year-old attempt at drama, and turned it into Happy Birthday, Wanda June. He found playwriting more difficult than he had anticipated and later described himself as “a madman who was attempting to extract moonbeams from excrement.” Happy Birthday, Wanda June opened on October 7, 1970, and ran Off Broadway until March 14, 1971. It has been revised since, most recently in a current production by the Actors Gang in a well-received production in Los Angeles.
In the early seventies Vonnegut returned to long fiction with three novels focused on aspects of contemporary American life. In Breakfast of Champions (1973) Vonnegut reexamined national emblems, symbols, songs, and mottoes, creating hyperbolic distinctions between pretense and reality, intention and achievement. His Slapstick (1976) was a novel that investigated social malaise by means of the futuristic setting of a balkanized America. He revisited this theme in Jailbird (1979), but he narrowed the focus by observing the effects of the American political system on two elderly people. In writing about the social activism in his work, Vonnegut notes:
There'll be more and more to complain about in my fiction. People will say it's not fiction any more, it's editorializing. And, you know, the stories are getting sketchier and sketchier and sketchier. But I like the activist works because they allow you to digress. I'm not capable of logic, really a paragraph to paragraph logic. And so the story form allows me to make statements that I know intuitively are true. I can't begin to buttress with arguments.
After Jailbird, Vonnegut wrote a children's book called Sun Moon Star, a story that recounts Jesus’ first visual perceptions. In 1982, shortly after his sixtieth birthday, Vonnegut published his tenth novel, Deadeye Dick. Since then, Vonnegut has published Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990) and Timequake (1997; his final novel).
Throughout his career and into the present, he has also written many introductions, essays, and commentaries in books and magazines; his political observations appear regularly in the progressive magazine In These Times. Vonnegut has also become an avid artist. He has held exhibitions of his work in galleries in New York City and other cities, and he actively markets his art online at www.vonnegut.com.
Today, Kurt Vonnegut is recognized as a thoughtful social critic whose work focuses on the impact of technology, science, and social behavior. His best writing combines comedy with drama, fantasy with history, and didacticism with farce. Through his damaged or faltering antiheroes, his stories search for life’s meaning in a society bereft of certainties.
So it goes.
—Noe Montez and Tom Shafer