Kurt Vonnegut

Born on 11 November 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr., a successful architect, and Edith Lieber, whose family owned a prominent brewery, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. grew up in comfort that the Depression destroyed. His father’s practice collapsed; his mother, depressed and addicted to alcohol and barbiturates, killed herself on Mother’s Day 1944, while Vonnegut was home on leave before shipping out to Europe. He attended Cornell, studied chemistry, wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun, and enlisted in the Army in 1943. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, he was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden , Schlachthof-fünf, Slaughterhouse Five , and survived the Allied firebombing of the city on 13 February 1945 by sheltering in a meat locker three stories underground. The experience took him twenty-three years to write about. After the war, he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, worked as a police reporter, and then took a public-relations job at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, writing short stories for magazines at night. Player Piano (1952), his first novel, satirized automation and corporate culture. The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) established him as a mordantly funny philosopher of human folly disguised as a science-fiction writer. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) , in which Billy Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time,” ricocheting between the Dresden firebombing, postwar America, and a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore , made him famous. “So it goes,” its refrain after every death, entered the American vernacular. He became a countercultural icon, a beloved campus speaker, and a tireless public moralist. He died on 11 April 2007 in Manhattan, from brain injuries sustained in a fall, at eighty-four.