Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84
stoney
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84
Author of at least 19 novels, including ‘Slaughterhouse Five,’ ‘Cat’s
Cradle’
Updated: 10:24 a.m. ET April 12, 2007
NEW YORK - {AP} Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the
absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly
humorous works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” died
Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his
lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his
Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as
dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of
a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for
themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions
he felt were dehumanizing people.
“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible
situations,” Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair
made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of
psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut
used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as
transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels
with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely
connected to the plot. In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” he drew a headstone
with the epitaph: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Struggles and a suicide attempt
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout
his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol,
joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for
Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during
the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs
created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the city.
“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I
write what I write and am what I am,” Vonnegut wrote in “Fates Worse
Than Death,” his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he
survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker
labeled slaughterhouse-five.
The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by
time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the
height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an
iconoclast.
“He was sort of like nobody else,” said Gore Vidal, who noted that he,
Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served
in World War II.
“He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn’t go in for
imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of
us who came out of the war in the 1940s made sort of the official
American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never
dull.”
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a
“fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker,” and
studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago’s City News Bureau, then did
public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his
first novel, “Player Piano,” in 1951, followed by “The Sirens of Titan,”
“Canary in a Cat House” and “Mother Night,” making ends meet by selling
Saabs on Cape Cod.
Novels impossible to ignore
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre
stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But
his novels became cult classics, especially “Cat’s Cradle” in 1963, in
which scientists create “ice-nine,” a crystal that turns water solid and
destroys the earth.
Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned
for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member
of the PEN writers’ aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom,
rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary
president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heroes with little control
over their fate. Pilgrim was an ungainly, lonely goof. The hero of “God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” was a sniveling, obese volunteer fireman.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but
culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the
planet.
“We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to
try very hard ... and too damn cheap,” he once suggested carving into a
wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to
publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with “A Man Without
a Country,” a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush
administration (“upper-crust C-students who know no history or
geography”) and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book’s success “a nice glass of champagne at the end of a
life.”
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York,
adopted his sister’s three young children after she died. He also had
three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later
adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer
Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he’d prefer to go out in
an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about
the difficulties of old age.
“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life;
old age is more like a semicolon,” Vonnegut told The Associated Press in
2005.
“My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in
life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I’ll do the same,
so as not to set a bad example for my children.”
Kurt Vonnegut works
— “Player Piano,” 1951
— “The Sirens of Titan,” 1959
— “Canary in a Cat House,” 1961 (short works)
— “Mother Night,” 1961
— “Cat’s Cradle,” 1963
— “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” 1965
— “Welcome to the Monkey House,” 1968 (short works)
— “Slaughterhouse-Five,” 1969
— “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” 1971 (play)
— “Between Time and Timbuktu,” 1972 (TV script)
— “Breakfast of Champions,” 1973
— “Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons,” 1974 (opinions)
— “Slapstick,” 1976
— “Jailbird,” 1979
— “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage,” 1981 (essays)
— “Deadeye Dick,” 1982
— “Galapagos,” 1985
— “Bluebeard,” 1987
— “Hocus Pocus,” 1990
— “Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s,”
1991 (essays)
— “Timequake,” 1997
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