Kurt Vonnegut

About Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest of three children in a prominent family of German-American heritage. He studied biochemistry at Cornell University before enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II. In December 1944, he was captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner of war in Dresden. He survived the February 1945 Allied firebombing of the city—which killed tens of thousands of civilians—by sheltering in an underground meat locker. That experience would become the central subject of his most famous and enduring work.

After the war, Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked as a publicist for General Electric before the success of his fiction freed him to write full time. His early novels—Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), and Cat's Cradle (1963)—established his reputation as a darkly comic science-fiction writer. But it was Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) that brought him mainstream fame. Published when anti-war sentiment was high, the novel reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list within weeks of its release and became an emblem of the counterculture era.

Slaughterhouse-Five and Censorship

Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who becomes "unstuck in time" and ricochets between his wartime imprisonment in Dresden, his postwar life in suburban upstate New York, and a distant planet called Tralfamadore. The novel's unconventional structure, antiwar stance, and frank content have made it one of the most challenged books in American schools and libraries. It has been objected to or removed in at least 18 documented instances, including a 1973 case in Drake, North Dakota, where copies were burned following a school board order. Vonnegut responded to that burning with a now-famous letter to the school board.

Beyond Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's bibliography includes 14 novels—among them Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), and Galapagos (1985)—as well as short-story collections, essays, and plays. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Harvard, and the City College of New York. He was elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His final book, A Man Without a Country (2005), was a collection of essays and became a late-career bestseller. He died in New York City on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84, from brain injuries following a fall at his Manhattan home.