Kurt vonnegut biography facts record

Despite facing personal struggles, including bouts of depression, Vonnegut's resilience and dedication to his craft established him as a beloved author and a significant influence on future generations of writers, earning him a devoted fanbase and critical acclaim. In his later years, Kurt Vonnegut continued to produce thought-provoking work, although he shifted his focus more towards nonfiction.

His final novel, "Timequake", was published in and, while it became a bestseller, it received mixed kurt vonnegut biographies facts record from critics. Instead, Vonnegut increasingly turned to autobiographical themes, addressing various subjects that reflected his unique perspectives on life, art, and society. His final book, "A Man Without a Country"consisted of a series of essays that offered an incisive look at contemporary politics and the human experience, solidifying his legacy as a keen observer of the human condition.

Tragically, Vonnegut faced numerous personal challenges throughout his life, including struggles with depression that culminated in an attempt to take his own life in Despite these battles, he remained a literary icon, deeply admired by fans and fellow writers alike. He was known for maintaining an active engagement with his readers, often sharing candid insights into his own vulnerabilities.

On April 11,Vonnegut passed away at the age of 84, succumbing to head injuries sustained from a fall in his New York home. He left behind a rich legacy, survived by his second wife, Jill Krementz, their adopted daughter, Lily, and six children from his first marriage. Kurt Vonnegut's personal life was marked by significant relationships and family commitments.

The couple established a loving household and had three biological children together: Mark, Ellen, and Nanette. Their marriage faced both joys and challenges, particularly following the tragic death of Vonnegut's sister, which led them to adopt her three children. This act of generosity showcased Vonnegut's deep sense of responsibility and care for family, unfolding a dynamic family life in the midst of his burgeoning literary career.

After a long marriage to Jane that lasted until her death inVonnegut found love again with photographer Jill Krementz, whom he married in This second marriage brought him kurt vonnegut biography facts record and a renewed sense of purpose. Some human structures, such as the Kremlinare coded signals from the aliens to their ship as to how long it may expect to wait for the repair to take place.

Reviewers were uncertain what to think of the book, with one comparing it to Offenbach 's opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Rumfoord, who is based on Franklin D. Rooseveltalso physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord is described this way: he "put a cigarette in a long, bone cigarette holder, lighted it. He thrust out his jaw. The cigarette holder pointed straight up.

Rosewater and Jailbird. Mother Nightpublished inreceived little attention at the time of its publication. Howard W. Campbell Jr. After the war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name, and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann. Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition: "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be".

Also published in was Vonnegut's short story " Harrison Bergeron ", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level "handicaps" and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government.

He escapes to a television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from her lead weights. In his biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short story shows "in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom". With Cat's CradleAllen wrote, "Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time".

Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bombseeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, "ice-nine", solid water stable at room temperature, but more dense than liquid water. If a particle of ice-nine is dropped in water, all of the surrounding water becomes ice-nine.

Felix Hoenikker is based on Bernard Vonnegut's boss at the GE Research Lab, Irving Langmuirand the way ice-nine is described in the novel is reminiscent of how Bernard Vonnegut explained his own invention, silver-iodide cloudseeding, to Kurt. After the oceans are converted to ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John kurt vonnegut biographies facts record the frozen surface, seeking to save himself and to make sure that his story survives.

Vonnegut based the title character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater on an accountant he knew in Cape Cod who specialized in clients in trouble and often had to comfort them. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy son of a Republican senator, seeks to atone for his wartime killing of noncombatant firefighters by serving in a volunteer fire department and by giving away money to those in trouble or need.

Stress from a battle for control of his charitable foundation pushes him over the edge, and he is placed in a mental hospital. He recovers and ends the financial battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs. Rosewater more "a cry from the heart than a novel under its author's full intellectual control", that reflected family and emotional stresses Vonnegut was going through at the time.

In the mids, Vonnegut contemplated abandoning his writing career. After spending almost two years at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowateaching one course each term, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany. By the time he won it, in Marchhe was becoming a well-known writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins.

Vonnegut had been writing about his war experiences at Dresden ever since he returned from the war, but unable to write anything that was acceptable to himself or his publishers; chapter one of Slaughterhouse-Five tells of his difficulties. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with many of the story's climaxes—Billy's death inhis kidnapping by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore nine years earlier, and the execution of Billy's friend Edgar Derby in the ashes of Dresden for stealing a teapot—disclosed in the story's first pages.

His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. No one else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal novelists. Vonnegut's earlier works had appealed strongly to many college students, and the antiwar message of Slaughterhouse-Five resonated with a generation marked by the Vietnam War.

He later stated that the loss of confidence in government that Vietnam caused finally allowed an honest conversation regarding events like Dresden. After Slaughterhouse-Five was published, Vonnegut embraced the fame and financial security that attended its release. He was hailed as a hero of the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States, was invited to speak at numerous rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country.

Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March 14, InUniversal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a filmwhich the author said was "flawless". When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, "It is done. Vonnegut's difficulties in his personal life thereafter materialized in numerous ways, including the painfully slow progress made on his next novel, the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions.

Inhe stopped writing the novel altogether. In Thomas S. Hischak's book American Literature on Stage and ScreenBreakfast of Champions was called "funny and outlandish", but reviewers noted that it "lacks substance and seems to be an exercise in literary playfulness". In The New York Times 's review of SlapstickChristopher Lehmann-Haupt said that Vonnegut "seems to be putting less effort into [storytelling] than ever before" and that "it still seems as if he has given up storytelling after all".

Vonnegut married his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, in She later embraced Christianity, which was contrary to Vonnegut's atheistic beliefs, and after five of their six children having left home, Vonnegut said that the two were forced to find "other sorts of seemingly important work to do". The couple battled over their differing beliefs until Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in Vonnegut called the disagreements "painful" and said that the resulting split was a "terrible, unavoidable accident that we were ill-equipped to understand".

Beyond his failed marriage, Vonnegut was deeply affected when his son Mark suffered a mental breakdown inwhich exacerbated Vonnegut's chronic depression and led him to take Ritalin. When he stopped taking the drug in the mids, he began to see a psychologist weekly. InVonnegut married Jill Krementza photographer whom he met while she was working on a series about writers in the early s.

With Jill, he adopted a daughter, Lily, when the baby was three days old. Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike—he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair.

He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.

Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! Vonnegut died in Manhattan on the night of April 11,as a result of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior, from a fall at his brownstone home. He was 84 years old. When asked about the impact Vonnegut had on his work, author Josip Novakovich stated that he has "much to learn from Vonnegut—how to compress things and yet not compromise them, how to digress into history, quote from various historical accounts, and not stifle the narrative.

The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian. Vonnegut has inspired numerous posthumous tributes and works. The Library of America published a compendium of Vonnegut's compositions between and the following April, and another compendium of his earlier works in Shields 's And So It Goes. According to The Guardianthe book portrays Vonnegut as distant, cruel and nasty.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well? Vonnegut's works have evoked ire on several occasions. His most prominent novel, Slaughterhouse-Fivehas been objected to or removed at various institutions in at least 18 instances.

Picothe United States Supreme Court ruled that a school district's ban on Slaughterhouse-Five —which the board had called "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy"—and eight other novels was unconstitutional. When a school board in Republic, Missouridecided to withdraw Vonnegut's novel from its libraries, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered a free copy to all the students of the district.

Tally, writing insuggests that Vonnegut has only recently become the subject of serious study rather than fan adulation, and much is yet to be written about him. We know he's worth reading. Now tell us things we don't know. Davis notes that Vonnegut's work is kept alive by his loyal readers, who have "significant influence as they continue to purchase Vonnegut's work, passing it on to subsequent generations and keeping his entire canon in print—an impressive list of more than twenty books that [Dell Publishing] has continued to refurbish and hawk with new cover designs.

Morse notes that Vonnegut "is now firmly, if somewhat controversially, ensconced in the American and world literary canon as well as in high school, college and graduate curricula". Vonnegut's 14 novels, while each does its own thing, together are nevertheless experiments in the same overall project. Experimenting with the form of the American novel itself, Vonnegut engages in a broadly modernist attempt to apprehend and depict the fragmented, unstable, and distressing bizarreries of postmodern American experience That he does not actually succeed in representing the shifting multiplicities of that social experience is beside the point.

What matters is the attempt, and the recognition that The beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and, when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on. In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-FiveVonnegut recounts meeting the film producer Harrison Starr at a party, who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—"Yes, I guess", replied Vonnegut.

Starr responded: "Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel? I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death". Vonnegut was a pacifist. InNPR wrote: "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the s. Bush administration led him to write A Man Without a Country.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the Vonnegut novel best known for its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare, opines that "wars were partly encouraged by books and movies", starring " Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men".

Nuclear waror at least deployed nuclear armsis mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Pianothe computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal and is charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In Cat's CradleJohn's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.

Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being.

I would just as soon be a rattlesnake. Vonnegut was an atheista humanist and a freethinkerserving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Kurt vonnegut biography facts record

In his autobiographical work Palm SundayVonnegut says that he is a "Christ-worshipping agnostic". However, he was keen to stress that he was not a Christian. Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mountparticularly the Beatitudesand incorporated it into his own doctrines. He despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded.

Religion features frequently in Vonnegut's work, both in his novels and elsewhere. He laced a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric [ ] [ ] and was prone to using such expressions as "God forbid" and "thank God". KevorkianVonnegut goes to heaven after he is euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviews 21 deceased celebrities, including Isaac AsimovWilliam Shakespeareand Kilgore Trout —the last a fictional character from several of his novels.

Slaughterhouse-Five sees Billy Pilgrim, lacking religion himself, nevertheless become a chaplain's assistant in the military and display a large crucifix on his bedroom wall. Vonnegut's thoughts on politics were shaped in large part by Robert Redfieldan anthropologist at the University of Chicagoco-founder of the Committee on Social Thoughtand one of Vonnegut's professors during his time at the university.

In a commencement address, Vonnegut remarked that "Dr. Redfield's theory of the Folk Society If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler? The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead. Vonnegut disregarded more mainstream American political ideologies in favor of socialismwhich he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of " survival of the fittest " in American society, [ ] believing that "socialism would be a good for the common man".

Debs : "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free. I welcome it. Do you know what a Luddite is? A person who hates newfangled contraptions. Political theorist Patrick Deneen has identified this skepticism of technological progress as a theme of Vonnegut novels and stories, including Player Piano"Harrison Bergeron", and " Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ".

The "newfangled contraptions" Vonnegut hated included the television, which he critiqued often throughout his non-fiction and fiction. In Timequakefor example, Vonnegut tells the story of "Booboolings", human analogs who develop morally through their imaginative formation. However, one evil sister on the planet of the Booboolings learns to build televisions from lunatics.

He writes:. When the bad sister was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then she got money from her very rich mom to kurt vonnegut biography facts record these satanic devices, which made imaginations redundant. They were instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking was involved Generations of Booboolings grew up without imaginations Without imaginations, though, they couldn't do what their ancestors had done, which was read interesting, heartwarming stories in the faces of one another.

Rosewate r and, inhis Dresden novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. In these books, Vonnegut mastered his trademark black comic voice, making his audience laugh despite the horrors he described. He had already developed a cult following of college students, but he broke through to a mass audience with Slaughterhouse-Five and the excellent film version of the novel that soon followed.

By the early s, Vonnegut was one of the most famous living writers on earth. Yet, the s proved a difficult kurt vonnegut biography facts record for Vonnegut. After his children grew up and left home, his long marriage to Jane fell apart. His son, Mark, suffered a bipolar disorder breakdown early in the decade, but recovered to write a book about it called The Eden Express.

While not altogether successful as fiction, these books helped Vonnegut work through the emotional problems that had plagued him since childhood. In the s, Vonnegut entered a second major phase of his career. Vonnegut also published his third major collection of essays, Palm Sunday. In his last novel, Timequakeand his last collection of essays, A Man without a Country, Vonnegut powerfully expressed his sense that corporate greed, overpopulation and war would win out in the end over simple humanity.

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11,after a fall on the steps of his New York brownstone. He was mourned the world over as one of the great American writers of the second half of the 20th century. Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin. In addition, he suffers from a peculiar condition, of being "unstuck in time," meaning that he randomly experiences events from his past, present, and future.

The novel is therefore a complex, nonchronological in no order of time narrative in which images of suffering and loss prevail. After the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut entered a period of depression during which he vowed, at one point, never to write another novel. He concentrated, instead, on lecturing, teaching, and finishing a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, that he had begun several years earlier.

The play, which ran Off-Broadway from October to Marchreceived mixed reviews. There were several factors which could be interpreted as the cause of Vonnegut's period of depression, including, as he admitted, the approach of his fiftieth birthday and the fact that his children had begun to leave home. Many critics believe that, having at last come to terms with Dresden, he lost the major inspiration for much of his work; others feel that Slaughterhouse-Five may have been the single great novel that Vonnegut was capable of writing.

Whatever the cause, Breakfast of Champions marked the end of his depression and a return to the novel. In Breakfast of Champions, as in most of Vonnegut's work, there are very clear autobiographical tendencies. In this novel however, the author seems to be even more wrapped up in his characters than usual. He appears as Philboyd Sludge, the writer of the book, which stars Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer Vonnegut once ran a Saab dealership who goes berserk after reading a novel by Kilgore Trout, who also represents Vonnegut.

Toward the end of the book, Vonnegut arranges a meeting between himself and Trout, whom Robert Merrill calls his "most famous creation," in which he casts the character loose forever; by this time the previously unsuccessful Trout has become rich and famous and is finally able to stand on his own. Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More both examine the widespread feelings of despair and loneliness that result from the loss of traditional culture in the United States; Jailbird recounts the story of a fictitious participant in the Watergate scandal of the Richard Nixon — administration, a scandal which ultimately led to the resignation of the president; Galapagos predicts the consequences of environmental pollution; and Hocus-Pocus; or, What's the Hurry, Son?

Before its release Vonnegut noted that Timequake would be his last novel. Although many of these works are highly regarded, critics frequently argue that in his later works Vonnegut tends to reiterate themes presented more compellingly in earlier works. Nevertheless, Vonnegut remains one of the most-loved American writers. Marvin, Thomas F.

Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Morse, Donald E. Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut, Kurt. New York : G.