(1922 - 2007)
During the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by German troops—“We were in this gully about as deep as a World War I trench. There was snow all around. Somebody said we were probably in Luxembourg. We were out of food,” he later recalled—and survived the firebombing of Dresden while a prisoner of war. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 and his sixth, Slaughterhouse-Five, in 1969.
Miscellany
“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his failed 1965 master’s thesis in anthropology, in which he argued that the plots of stories, when graphed, conform to a set of standard patterns. “The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.”
If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.
—Kurt Vonnegut, 1988Life is no way to treat an animal.
—Kurt Vonnegut, 2005
