Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), whose critical and world-changing experience occured during World War II in the fire-bombing of Dresden, was a comprehensive chronicler of the United States of America from that famously (or notoriously) balanced midwestern perspective. Vonnegut was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He went to Cornell University for a time, became an editor on the Cornell Daily Sun, but left his formal education to join the Army during WWII. He was captured and made a prisoner of war during the Battle of the Bulge. He miraculously survived (he would have objected to the adverb) the bombing of Dresden, an event conveyed in his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade (1969).
He began writing with a purpose after the war, beginning in the poor-cousin field of science fiction, which had the freedom and critical distance that suited him, the marginalized outsider elevation to toss his satirical stones at the glass hothouse of postwar America. He won awards, he gained mainstream notice, but it took the Vietnam War and the embrace of a protest counterculture to make this outsider secure finanacially and artistically. He was a strong and unapologetic heart-of-the-country voice, a 20th Century Mark Twain without the fits of nostalgia. He thrived on irony and the acrid whiff of despair, but he was stubborn about the critical voice. He never gave up on it, no matter how clearly and devastingly he wrote that nothing was worth saving.
When he died in 2007, Lev Grossman in Time magazine summed up what was beginning to dawn upon us all:
“Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike – he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.” (Time, April 12, 2007)
Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973
Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973
Like his idol Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut was a sly and skeptical Midwestern everyman outraged by the depravity of the damned human race. A consummate entertainer—few storytellers are as dependably funny—he was also a clear-eyed critic of American life. Among the targets of his ridicule were the exploiters, the despoilers, and the soulless parasitic moneymakers, but he reserved his hottest anger for that tribe of scientists and merchants of war who conjure up genies of mass destruction without a thought to what happens once they’re out of their bottles. Yet his works are remarkably free of villains, being rich instead in dangerous, not-quite-unlovable sinners who may yet be redeemed.
This volume, the first in a multi-volume edition of his enduring fiction, captures Vonnegut at the pyrotechnic height of his powers. It opens with Cat’s Cradle (1963), perhaps his most exhilarating performance, in which a would-be historian of the bombing of Hiroshima finds himself a privileged witness to the icy end of the world.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) chronicles the alcoholic unraveling and spiritual rebirth of a good-hearted dreamer tormented by the question “What are people for?”
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)—the book that earned Vonnegut worldwide fame, and one of the great antiwar novels in literature—is the jump-cutting saga of Billy Pilgrim, who, having come unstuck in time, is doomed to relive continually both the destruction of Dresden and his abduction by space aliens.
In a text enhanced by the author’s spirited line drawings, Breakfast of Champions (1973) describes the fateful meeting of a luckless science-fiction writer and an unhinged Pontiac dealer who disastrously believes that everyone but himself is a robot.
Rounding out the volume are three brilliant short stories—including the classic fantasy “Welcome to the Monkey House”—and moving autobiographical accounts of Vonnegut’s experience of war that shed light on events imaginatively treated in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Sidney Offit, editor, has written novels, books for young readers, and memoirs including, most recently, Friends, Writers, and Other Countrymen. He was senior editor of Intellectual Digest, book editor of Politics Today, and contributing editor of Baseball Magazine. He wrote the foreword to Look at the Birdie, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished short fiction.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.