American author (1922–2007)
People connected to Kurt Vonnegut
He turned surviving the Dresden firebombing in a slaughterhouse meat locker into Slaughterhouse-Five, the anti-war novel that made him famous in 1969 when America needed to hear it most.
Born in Indianapolis in 1922, Vonnegut studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie and Tennessee as part of his Army training, then landed in Europe during World War II. Captured at the Battle of the Bulge, he was imprisoned in Dresden and rode out the Allied bombing underground in a meat locker. After the war he married Jane Marie Cox, worked nights at Chicago's City News Bureau, and published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 to good reviews and poor sales. The next two decades brought well-regarded work — The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle (both Hugo-nominated), the story collection Welc…
Sourced, dated quotes from Kurt Vonnegut
I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts.
Humor is a way of coping with real trouble. … My next book [Slaughterhouse Five] is a comedy. It is about the largest massacre in the history of Europe.
Be kind. Don't kill for any reason. Don't even kill out of self-defense. Really — I mean that. Don't take any more than you need of anything. Help others.
This speech will be very short. After all, you asked me to come here — I didn't ask you.
The thing I just wrote [Slaughterhouse Five] is my masterpiece. The rest of it is going to be crap from now on.
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