...The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut. His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation. After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz.[2] Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized. He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; his sister Alice's three children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer; and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His only biological son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, wrote the book The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity (Seven Stories Press, 2010),[22] about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.[23] His daughter Edith ("Edie")...
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...Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut, the author of many amazing books, essays, and plays is also one of the most renounced authors of the 21st century. His ability to humor, entertain, and infrom the reader in issues of war, society, and religion has brought him much praise and even reproach. He has encountered many struggles to convey his life's work. Throughout many of Vonnegut's works, we are shown his ability to turn major events in his life into satirical dark humor. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis Indiana. He spent most of his life and adolesnce in Indianapolis and is very thankfull."What people like about me is Indianoplis" (The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial). Kurt graduated Shortridge High, where he was a writer and editor of his school newspaper. Later he attended Cornwell University. Kurt hoped to follow in his father and grandfather's footsteps in becoming an architect. Due to the economic crisis that fell in 1929 that lasted through the 1960s known as the Great Depression, Kurt was urged by his father to major in something else. He decided to study Biology and Chemistry. Later he attended Carnegie Institute of Techology and the University of Tennesse. At 20 years of age when World War II broke Vonnegut enlisted into the army. In 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge in Dreseden Germany,Vonnegut was captured and became a prisoner of war. Vonnegut and fellow POWs where kept to work in a factory that produced vitamins, and were sent to...
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...I. Introduction In his foreword to a collection of the radio scripts of comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. endorses these entertainers as somehow new and different—and relevant—since they draw their humor from the plight of the (American) Common Man. In the process, Vonnegut offers us an insight into his own writing, and the philosophies that inform it. “They aren’t like most other comedians’ jokes these days,” Vonnegut writes, aren’t rooted in show business and the world of celebrities and news of the day. They feature Americans who are almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane. And while other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray’s characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. There is a refreshing and beautiful innocence in Bob’s and Ray’s humor. Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive. And this I believe. Jerome Klinkowitz, in the introduction to his essay collection entitled Vonnegut in America, has used this quote—as he certainly should—to support his claim that Vonnegut’s humor has its roots in the comedic response to the Great Depression. But of course there is much more to it than that. The reader is left with a nagging question: Were humanity’s case really as Vonnegut describes it, and were this truly his belief, wouldn’t it seem that the...
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