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Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut. His Life. Kurt Vonnegut’s great-grandparents came to the United States from Germany in the 1850’s. He was the youngest of three children.

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Kurt Vonnegut

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  1. Kurt Vonnegut

  2. His Life • Kurt Vonnegut’s great-grandparents came to the United States from Germany in the 1850’s. • He was the youngest of three children. • His father was an architect whose unemployment as a result of the Great Depression led to a decline in the family’s fortunes, contributing to his mother’s suicide in 1944.

  3. Kurt attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis and wrote for its newspaper, the Daily Echo. • He continued newspaper writing when he went to Cornell University in 1940. • Although he had written against American entry into World War II, after Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the Army, was sent to Europe, and was captured in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. • He was imprisoned in Dresden, where he witnessed the Allied fire bombing that destroyed that city on February 13 and 14, 1945. • Years later, that experience became the basis of his best-known novel, Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death.

  4. On his return to the United States he was married (Jane Marie Cox) and had three children • Later he and his wife adopted three more children when his sister and her husband died within forty-eight hours of each other. • He attended graduate school in anthropology at the University of Chicago, then took a job as a public relations writer for the General Electric Company. • There he began writing short stories, publishing his first, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” in 1950. • He then devoted himself full-time to writing.

  5. After returning from World War II he separated from wife (Cox) in 1970. • He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, Jill Krementz. • Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized. • Died: April 11, 2007 following a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks earlier which resulted in irreversible brain injuries. • He was 84 years old at the time of his death. • Coincidentally, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in the prologue of Breakfast of Champions that his alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, would die at the age of 84.

  6. BIBLIOGRAPHY • Player Piano (1952) • The Sirens of Titan (1959) • Mother Night (1961) • Cat's Cradle (1963) • God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (1965) • Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969) • Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (1973) • Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More (1976) • Jailbird (1979) • Deadeye Dick (1982) • Galápagos (1985) • Bluebeard (1987) • Hocus Pocus (1990) • Timequake (1997)

  7. Sculpture #27"WASPWAIST"Price: $9,000 An aluminum cut-out sculpture by Kurt Vonnegut. Each is cut from 1/4" aluminum with a 1/2" thick base. The height is approximately 24" with a 6" base. The image is in relief and painted mat black. Each is signed and numbered in an edition of nine.

  8. Sketch One-Liner #4 Self-Portrait 5/7/05 Edition of 80One color silkscreen on white Rising Stonehenge deckle edge cotton paper 11 x 15 inches.Signed and numbered in pencil by the artist. 2006. Price: $400.00

  9. “There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.” • - The Sirens of Titan

  10. WWII Influences • Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. • As a private with the 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion along with five other battalion scouts who wandered behind enemy lines for several days until captured by Wehrmacht troops on December 14, 1944. • Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945, which destroyed most of the city.

  11. Vonnegut was one of a few American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive, in their cell in an underground meatlocker of a slaughterhouse that had been converted to a prison camp. • The administration building had the postal address Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the prisoners took to using as the name for the whole camp. • Vonnegut recalled the facility as "Utter destruction", "carnage unfathomable."

  12. The Germans put him to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes.“ • This experience formed the core of one of his most famous works, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a theme in at least six other books. • Vonnegut was freed by Red Army troops in May 1945. • Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound,” later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".

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