Kurt Vonnegut  

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and dystopian science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973).

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On peepholes

In some of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, when somebody dies, Vonnegut does not call it dying. He writes that this person had their "peephole closed" and when they are born, they simply have their "peephole opened".

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Self-assessment

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that. He wrote an earlier version of writing tips that was even more straightforward and contained only seven rules (though it advised using Elements of Style for more indepth advice).

In "The Sexual Revolution", Chapter 18 of his book Palm Sunday, Vonnegut grades his own works. He states that the grades "do not place me in literary history" and that he is comparing "myself with myself." The grades are as follows:

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Bibliography

The following is a complete list of literary works by the late author Kurt Vonnegut.

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Novels

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Collections

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Articles

In These Times Magazine: Template:Cite news

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Plays

  • Penelope (1960) - revised as Happy Birthday, Wanda June in 1970
  • Between Time and Timbuktu; or, Prometheus-5: a Space Fantasy (1972) - National Educational Television Network. Based on materials by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Designed by Joel Schick with photos. by Jill Krementz and from the NET playhouse production.
  • Requiem (1987) - music by Edgar David Grana
  • Make Up Your Mind (1993)
  • Miss Temptation (1993) - adapted by David Cooperman
  • L'Histoire du Soldat (1993) - an adaptation



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Kurt Vonnegut" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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