Darkly comic novelist a counterculture hero
KURT VONNEGUT: 1922-2007
Dinitia Smith, New York Times
Thursday, April 12, 2007

New York -- Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels such as "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84.

His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and '70s.

Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence and, like Mark Twain, had a profound pessimism. "Mark Twain," Vonnegut wrote in his 1992 book, "Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage," "finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died."

His novels -- 14 in all -- were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums.

The defining moment of Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated.

The raid was the basis of "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age."

To Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," summed up his philosophy:
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God **** it, you've got to be kind.' "

Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him "one of the most able of living American writers." Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a fourth-generation German American and the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Vonnegut's brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, Edith Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

Vonnegut went East to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. In 1944, he was shipped to Europe and saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden.

When the war ended, Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children: Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Vonnegut's sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts adopted their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on "The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales."

It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel "Cat's Cradle" as his thesis.)
In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for General Electric Co.

Three years later, he sold his first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," to Collier's magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and the Saturday Evening Post.

To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency, and at one point started an auto dealership.

His first novel was "Player Piano," published in 1952, a satire on corporate life. It was followed in 1959 by "The Sirens of Titan," a science fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent.

In 1961, he published "Mother Night," involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany.

In 1963, Vonnegut published "Cat's Cradle." Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The narrator, an adherent of the Zenlike religion Bokononism, comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes water to freeze at room temperature.

Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with "Slaughterhouse-Five." It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Vonnegut was) who discovers the horror of war. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round," Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, "was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
"Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."

One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Vonnegut's books, "so it goes" became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam War.

"Slaughterhouse-Five" reached No. 1 on best-seller lists, making Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

Forsaking novels, Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time, he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

In 1979, Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Vonnegut returned to novels with "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday" (1973), and "Timequake" (1997), a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, though it was a best-seller, also met with mixed reviews.

Vonnegut said in the prologue to "Timequake" that it would be his last novel. And so it was. His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, "A Man Without a Country." It, too, was a best-seller.