This week we are celebrating the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut, born on November 11th, 1922! Few writers have made readers laugh, wince and rethink the entire human experience in a single paragraph, and he would have turned 104 today. So pull up a chair… and try not to become unstuck in time, if you can help it!
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Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest of three children in a German-American family whose comfortable fortune took a hard hit during the Great Depression. Books, music and humor were abundant at home during his childhood, and the young Vonnegut played the clarinet, doodled constantly and wrote for his high school paper, the Shortridge Daily Echo. He enrolled at Cornell University to study biochemistry, following in the footsteps of his older brother Bernard. That being said, he spent far more time writing for the Cornell Daily Sun than he did in the lab (clearly, the chemistry just wasn’t there… get it?). World War II interrupted his studies, and as a soldier in December of 1944 he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. He survived the Allied firebombing of the city that February by sheltering in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker, an experience that would haunt, and eventually define, his writing.
After the end of the war, Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and took a public relations job at General Electric, writing fiction on the side. His debut novel, Player Piano (1952), imagined a world run by machines, and was followed by The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961) and Cat’s Cradle (1963), which introduced the made-up religion of Bokononism and was later accepted by Chicago as his master’s thesis in 1971. Then came God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and, of course, the masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the Dresden story told through the time-traveling Billy Pilgrim, which made him a household name and gave us the immortal refrain “so it goes.” His later novels include Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), Galápagos (1985) and Timequake (1997), alongside the short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) and the essays of A Man Without a Country (2005).
Vonnegut passed away in New York City on April 11th, 2007, at the age of 84, yet his voice has hardly faded in our current literary landscape. His curious blend of dark humor, science fiction and plainspoken moral concern has helped shape generations of writers, with George Saunders among those who have openly championed him as an inspiration. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) remains one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools, which keeps it at the center of conversations about censorship and free speech/expression. Meanwhile, the worries of Player Piano (1952) about automation and the human cost of progress feel almost eerily current in an age of artificial intelligence. At his core, he was a humanist who urged us to be kinder to one another… a message that ought to never go out of style. Happy birthday, Mr. Vonnegut – “so it goes”… but we’re so glad he came along!
