Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels.
96 Facts About Kurt Vonnegut
2.
Kurt Vonnegut was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge.
3.
Kurt Vonnegut was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned.
4.
Kurt Vonnegut adopted his nephews after his sister died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.
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Kurt Vonnegut published a short-story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968.
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Kurt Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
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Kurt Vonnegut was invited to give speeches, lectures, and commencement addresses around the country, and received many awards and honors.
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Later in his career, Kurt Vonnegut published several autobiographical essay and short-story collections, such as Fates Worse Than Death and A Man Without a Country.
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Kurt Vonnegut had descended from German immigrants who settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; his paternal great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company.
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Kurt Vonnegut's mother was born into Indianapolis high society, as her family, the Liebers, were among the wealthiest in the city with their fortune deriving from ownership of a successful brewery.
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Kurt Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper during the first decade of his life, for raising him and giving him values; he said that she "gave [him] decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to [him]", and "was as great an influence on [him] as anybody".
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Kurt Vonnegut described her as "humane and wise" and added that "the compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs" came from her.
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Kurt Vonnegut was bothered by the Great Depression, and both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune.
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Kurt Vonnegut's father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a "dreamy artist".
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Kurt Vonnegut labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said that she expressed hatred for her husband that was "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid".
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Kurt Vonnegut unsuccessfully tried to sell short stories she had written to Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines.
17.
Kurt Vonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936.
18.
Kurt Vonnegut wanted to study the humanities or become an architect like his father, but his father and brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist, urged him to study a "useful" discipline.
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Kurt Vonnegut overcame stiff competition for a place at the university's independent newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor.
20.
Kurt Vonnegut was a member of Reserve Officers' Training Corps, but poor grades and a satirical article in Cornell's newspaper cost him his place there.
21.
Kurt Vonnegut was placed on academic probation in May 1942 and dropped out the following January.
22.
Kurt Vonnegut was trained to fire and maintain howitzers and later received instruction in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Specialized Training Program.
23.
In early 1944, the ASTP was canceled due to the Army's need for soldiers to support the D-Day invasion, and Kurt Vonnegut was ordered to an infantry battalion at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis in Edinburgh, Indiana, where he trained as a scout.
24.
Kurt Vonnegut lived so close to his home that he was "able to sleep in [his] own bedroom and use the family car on weekends".
25.
On May 14,1944, Kurt Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother's Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills.
26.
Possible factors that contributed to Edith Kurt Vonnegut's suicide include the family's loss of wealth and status, Kurt Vonnegut's forthcoming deployment overseas, and her own lack of success as a writer.
27.
Kurt Vonnegut was inebriated at the time and under the influence of prescription drugs.
28.
Three months after his mother's suicide, Kurt Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division.
29.
Kurt Vonnegut was taken by boxcar to a prison camp south of Dresden, in the German province of Saxony.
30.
Kurt Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, the "first fancy city [he had] ever seen".
31.
Kurt Vonnegut lived in a slaughterhouse when he got to the city, and worked in a factory that made malt syrup for pregnant women.
32.
Kurt Vonnegut recalled the sirens going off whenever another city was bombed.
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Kurt Vonnegut marveled at the level of both the destruction in Dresden and the secrecy that attended it.
34.
Kurt Vonnegut had survived by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground.
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Kurt Vonnegut described the activity as a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt".
36.
Kurt Vonnegut returned to the United States and continued to serve in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers.
37.
Kurt Vonnegut augmented his income by working as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago at night.
38.
Kurt Vonnegut failed to write a dissertation, as his ideas had all been rejected.
39.
Kurt Vonnegut received his graduate degree in anthropology 25 years after he left, when the University accepted his novel Cat's Cradle in lieu of his master's thesis.
40.
Still working for GE, Kurt Vonnegut had his first piece, titled "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", published in the February 11,1950, issue of Collier's, for which he received $750.
41.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote another story, after being coached by the fiction editor at Collier's, Knox Burger, and again sold it to the magazine, this time for $950.
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Kurt Vonnegut initially moved to Osterville, but he ended up purchasing a home in Barnstable.
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Kurt Vonnegut defended the genre and deplored a perceived sentiment that "no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works".
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Kurt Vonnegut meets Winston Rumfoord, an aristocratic space traveler, who is virtually omniscient but stuck in a time warp that allows him to appear on Earth every 59 days.
45.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition: "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be".
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Kurt Vonnegut based the title character of God Bless You, Mr.
47.
Kurt Vonnegut recovers and ends the financial battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs.
48.
Kurt Vonnegut used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins.
49.
At the time of the bombing, Kurt Vonnegut had not appreciated the sheer scale of destruction in Dresden; his enlightenment came only slowly as information dribbled out, and based on early figures, he came to believe that 135,000 had died there.
50.
Kurt Vonnegut later stated that the loss of confidence in government that Vietnam caused finally allowed an honest conversation regarding events like Dresden.
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Kurt Vonnegut was hailed as a hero of the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States, was invited to speak at numerous rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country.
52.
Kurt Vonnegut was later elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and given honorary degrees by, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College.
53.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a play called Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which opened on October 7,1970, at New York's Theatre de Lys.
54.
The couple battled over their differing beliefs until Kurt Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in 1971.
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Kurt Vonnegut called the disagreements "painful" and said that the resulting split was a "terrible, unavoidable accident that we were ill-equipped to understand".
56.
Kurt Vonnegut's difficulties materialized in numerous ways; most distinctly though, was the painfully slow progress he was making on his next novel, the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions.
57.
At times, Kurt Vonnegut was disgruntled by the personal nature of his detractors' complaints.
58.
In 1979, Kurt Vonnegut married Jill Krementz, a photographer whom he met while she was working on a series about writers in the early 1970s.
59.
Two years later, Kurt Vonnegut was seen by a younger generation when he played himself in Rodney Dangerfield's film Back to School.
60.
Kurt Vonnegut died in the Manhattan borough of New York City on the night of April 11,2007, as a result of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior, from a fall at his brownstone home.
61.
In 2008, the Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis.
62.
Tally, writing in 2013, suggests that Kurt Vonnegut has only recently become the subject of serious study rather than fan adulation, and much is yet to be written about him.
63.
Kurt Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday : "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima".
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Kurt Vonnegut was an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker, serving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
65.
Kurt Vonnegut did not disdain those who seek the comfort of religion, hailing church associations as a type of extended family.
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Kurt Vonnegut occasionally attended a Unitarian church, but with little consistency.
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Kurt Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines.
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However, Kurt Vonnegut had a deep dislike for certain aspects of Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the Crusades and other religion-inspired violence.
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Kurt Vonnegut despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded.
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Kurt Vonnegut laced a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric and was prone to using such expressions as "God forbid" and "thank God".
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Kurt Vonnegut once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which he then had translated into Latin and set to music.
72.
Kurt Vonnegut's works are filled with characters founding new faiths, and religion often serves as a major plot device, for example, in Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle.
73.
Kurt Vonnegut disregarded more mainstream American political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of "survival of the fittest" in American society, believing that "socialism would be a good for the common man".
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Kurt Vonnegut's writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources.
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When he was younger, Kurt Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure.
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Kurt Vonnegut cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story and deeming any who disagreed or had not read the story "twerps".
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Kurt Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell.
78.
Kurt Vonnegut said that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley heavily influenced his debut novel, Player Piano, in 1952.
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Kurt Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic in his own compositions.
80.
Kurt Vonnegut hailed playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as "a hero of [his]" and an "enormous influence".
81.
Early on in his career, Kurt Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's works to be more widely comprehensible.
82.
I've heard the Kurt Vonnegut voice described as "manic depressive", and there's certainly something to this.
83.
Kurt Vonnegut uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a way that is intelligible to a large audience.
84.
Kurt Vonnegut credited his time as a journalist for his ability, pointing to his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required him to convey stories in telephone conversations.
85.
Kurt Vonnegut's compositions are laced with distinct references to his own life, notably in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick.
86.
Kurt Vonnegut believed that ideas, and the convincing communication of those ideas to the reader, were vital to literary art.
87.
Kurt Vonnegut did not always sugarcoat his points: much of Player Piano leads up to the moment when Paul, on trial and hooked up to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood, and states: "every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity".
88.
Kurt Vonnegut did not simply propose utopian solutions to the ills of American society, but showed how such schemes would not allow ordinary people to live lives free from want and anxiety.
89.
Kurt Vonnegut's works have, at various times, been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern.
90.
Kurt Vonnegut resisted such labels, but his works do contain common tropes that are often associated with those genres.
91.
Kurt Vonnegut was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his writings.
92.
Kurt Vonnegut confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces.
93.
The majority of Kurt Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their actual families and seek to build replacement or extended families.
94.
Kurt Vonnegut confronts these things in his works through references to the growing use of automation and its effects on human society.
95.
Kurt Vonnegut uses this as an explanation for why humans have so severely damaged their environments and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct.
96.
Kurt Vonnegut uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of those who put powerful, apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of politicians.