10 Things Writers Should Know About Kurt Vonnegut
Author Susan Farrell shares 10 things writers should know about Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle.
(Editor's note: Recently, Susan Farrell, author of Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five, put together a list of 10 things writers should know about the author and his popular novel.)
He had some of the same war experiences as his characters.
Serving as a scout in World War Two, Vonnegut was captured behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, he was shipped in crowded boxcars and imprisoned in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden, where, filthy and starving, he experienced the Allied firebombing of the city and was later put to work digging corpses out from the rubble.
Two of his fellow soldiers would inspire Vonnegut’s war book: Edward R. Crone, Jr., a passive young man who died of despair and malnutrition would become Billy Pilgrim, while Michael Palia, executed by the Germans for looting a jar of string beans, would become patriotic high school teacher, Edgar Derby.
It was very difficult to get reliable information about the Dresden firebombing.
When he wrote to the U.S. government for information about the Dresden bombings, Vonnegut was told the incident was still “top secret.” He turned instead to the work of historian David Irving, whose 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden, was the most critically acclaimed account of the firebombing at the time.
But, in a real-life tale that is stranger than fiction, Irving, a respected historian in the 1960s, would later become entangled in forged Nazi documents, and a court of law would judge that his book had deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence. Irving himself would be sentenced to three years of prison in Austria for Holocaust denial, and the numbers killed in the Dresden bombing would be debated for decades.
Slaughterhouse-Five was influenced by popular alien abduction stories of the 1960s.
New archival work shows that alien kidnapping first entered into drafts of the novel in 1967, long after Vonnegut began serious work on the book. Vonnegut was influenced by well-publicized 1960s tales of alien abduction, especially the famous Barney and Betty Hill case.
Springing from Cold War fears about new space and reproductive technologies, these dominant post-war myths provided Vonnegut a perfect frame on which to hang his Dresden story. Billy Pilgrim, the novel’s damaged anti-hero, reimagines his wartime capture as an alien abduction, a fantasy that comforts Billy since the aliens teach him the world is deterministic and death does not matter.
He got his start writing for newspapers.
Like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway before him, Vonnegut learned his craft from the demands of newspaper writing. He was fortunate to attend an excellent public high school in Indianapolis that published a daily newspaper.
He would work as both a writer and editor for the Shortridge Echo and later for his college newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun. When he returned from the war, he worked for the Chicago City News Bureau and considered a journalism career before fully committing himself to fiction-writing.
He wrote beautiful love letters to his first wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut.
A large trove of letters recently discovered and published by his daughter Edith depicts a love-sick young man with big plans for the future. Kurt’s letters to Jane, nicknamed “Woofy,” were effusive and clever, often peppered with drawings and poems. They asserted his respect of science, his great admiration for the writer Thoreau, and his interest in big, philosophical ideas.
But his great theme was how he felt about Jane: “Darling, at this moment, as I write, you are being loved so much that my heart is nearly bursting,” he wrote on May 3, 1944. Shortly after their marriage, but separated again by his army obligations, he expressed gratitude for “the cool, the sweet, the gentle and deep, the brilliant, exquisitely melodic, rhapsodic, rolling, rumbling, thundering, hell-fire burning, throbbing, bursting, trembling, sighing, crying, dying, smiling, sleeping love” that Jane gave him.
He studied anthropology as a graduate student.
Vonnegut’s son Mark once asked him what had been the happiest day of his life so far. Kurt replied that it was in fall of 1945, when, just discharged from the Army, he was admitted to the University of Chicago: “At last! I was going to study man!”
At Chicago, Vonnegut became fascinated by the small folk societies he heard about in a series of lectures delivered by Dr. Robert Redfield. Such communities were small enough that everybody knew everybody else. Individuals were valued for themselves rather than for their utility to the group. To Vonnegut, Redfield’s ideas explained why people had difficulty tolerating the crowded anonymity and loneliness of modern American life.
He was the father of six children.
The Vonnegut family life took a traumatic turn in 1958 when Kurt’s beloved sister Alice died of cancer 48 hours after her husband, James Adams, was killed in a commuter train crash. Jane and Kurt took in the four Adams boys after their parents’ deaths. The youngest, only two years old, would eventually be adopted by relatives in Alabama, but the three older boys (aged 14, 11, and 9) stayed with Kurt and Jane’s family until they were adults.
The death of Alice affected Kurt immensely. He had been fiercely attached to her, and she had always been the imagined audience for his writing. The blending of the three cousins with the three Vonnegut children into one large family was not easy. A riotous bunch, the Vonnegut household was loud, disorganized, and chaotic, but also free-wheeling, artsy, and imaginative.
Science fiction writer Kilgore Trout was based on a real person.
Kilgore Trout, a recurring character in several of Vonnegut’s novels, is a science fiction writer with great ideas but lousy writing skills. His work is often relegated to the back of porn stores and pulp magazines. Trout’s most significant appearance might be in the 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions, when Vonnegut the author enters the story to tell Trout he is a fictional character and to set him free.
While Trout serves as an alter-ego for Vonnegut himself, he is also based on Theodore Sturgeon, a colorful and prolific American science fiction writer who, during his heyday in the 1950s, was the most anthologized author alive. Vonnegut met Sturgeon while living in Cape Cod, and the two became close friends.
He was a beloved graduation speaker.
Vonnegut delivered dozens of quirky commencement addresses over his lifetime. He made preposterous claims. His speeches made people laugh and made them think. They were speeches the graduates remembered.
In the early 1970s, as the U.S. was fighting what most college students believed was an unjust war in Vietnam, Vonnegut used his own experience in the Second World War to destroy any notion of a good war. “For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own,” he lamented.
Military science treats human beings as contemptible, he told students, and it’s probably right. Still, he begged students to deny that contemptibility by creating art. Art puts human beings at the center of the universe, he explained, whether they belong there or not, allowing people to imagine and create a saner, kinder, more just world than the one we really live in.
He appeared in movies and television commercials.
After his success with Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, Vonnegut became something of a celebrity, his droopy eyes and wild hair immediately recognizable to the American public. He hosted several television anthology adaptations of his own work and appeared in commercials for Discover credit cards and the National Coffee Association. He made cameos in movies based on his fiction and served as a voice actor in Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, The Civil War.
Most amusingly, he appeared as himself in the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy, Back to School. Dangerfield’s character hires Vonnegut to write an essay about Vonnegut’s own works, but his teacher fails him anyway, claiming the essay shows he knows nothing about Vonnegut.
Check out Susan Farrell's Vonnegut's War here:
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