Kurt Vonnegut
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General." --"Harrison Bergeron" (1961) Kurt Vonnegut |
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He later adopted his sister's three sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.
Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful. In the nearly 20 years that followed, Vonnegut published several novels that were only marginally successful, such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures and commencement addresses around the country and received many awards and honors.
Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections, including Fates Worse Than Death (1991), and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as a morbidly comical commentator on the society in which he lived and as one of the most important contemporary writers. Vonnegut's son Mark published a compilation of his father's unpublished compositions, titled Armageddon in Retrospect. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction including 5 previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.
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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".
Self-assessment
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Chapter 18, "The Sexual Revolution," 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:
- Player Piano: B
- The Sirens of Titan: A
- Mother Night: A
- Cat's Cradle: A+
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
- Slaughterhouse-Five: A+
- Welcome to the Monkey House: B−
- Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
- Breakfast of Champions: C
- Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons: C
- Slapstick: D
- Jailbird: A
- Palm Sunday: C
Bibliography
Unless otherwise cited, items in this list are taken from Thomas F. Marvin's 2002 book Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, and the date in brackets is the date the work was first published:
Novels
- Player Piano (1952)
- The Sirens of Titan (1959)
- Mother Night (1961)
- Cat's Cradle (1963)
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- Breakfast of Champions (1973)
- Slapstick (1976)
- Jailbird (1979)
- Deadeye Dick (1982)
- Galápagos (1985)
- Bluebeard (1987)
- Hocus Pocus (1990)
- Timequake (1997)
Short fiction collections
- Canary in a Cat House (1961)
- Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)
- Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970)
- Between Time and Timbuktu (1972)
- Sun Moon Star (1980)
- Bagombo Snuff Box (1997)
- God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)
- Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) – short stories and essays
- Look at the Birdie (2009)
- While Mortals Sleep (2011)
- We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012)
- Sucker's Portfolio (2013)
- Complete Stories (2017)
Nonfiction
- Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)
- Palm Sunday (1981)
- Nothing Is Lost Save Honor: Two Essays (1984)
- Fates Worse Than Death (1991)
- A Man Without a Country (2005)Template:Sfn
- Kurt Vonnegut: The Cornell Sun Years 1941–1943 (2012)
- If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young (2013)
- Vonnegut by the Dozen (2013)
- Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (2014)
Interviews
- Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (1988) with William Rodney Allen
- Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation About Writing (2010) with Lee Stringer
- Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (2011)
Art
- Kurt Vonnegut Drawings (2014)
Cinematography
2081 (film), Between Time and Timbuktu, Breakfast of Champions (film), Displaced Person (American Playhouse), Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Harrison Bergeron (film), Mother Night (film), Slapstick of Another Kind, Slaughterhouse-Five (film), Who Am I This Time? (film)
See also