Kurt Vonnegut

‘A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod’ is how Kurt Vonnegut described himself in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that brought him to prominence as an uncompromising critic of post-war American life, able and unafraid to use dark humour to tackle subjects such as social inequality, the dehumanizing effects of mechanization, nuclear weapons and science and ethics. ...

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and educated at Cornell and Chicago Universities before enrolling – pre-empting conscription – in the US Army in 1942. He was sent to Europe in 1944, just a few months after his mother had committed suicide, and fought in the Second World War Battle of the Bulge. Captured by German forces, he was in a slaughterhouse being used as a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden during the Allied fire-bombing of the city. Based on that experience, the anti-war Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969, during America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Written many years before that breakthrough, Player Piano (1951) was Vonnegut’s first book, a satire on the failings of industrial and corporate life, transparently based on General Electric, where he worked prior to deciding to be a full-time writer and moving to Cape Cod. Although novels such as The Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle were popular, they were perceived as science fiction, which critics regarded as an inferior genre at that time.

After 1969, Vonnegut became respected as a writer and, at last, financially well-off, but while he enjoyed literary success, his personal life was falling apart during the 1970s and 1980s: he was divorced after a long and supportive marriage, he left Cape Cod for New York and suffered from depression.

Slaughterhouse-Five remains the outstanding work of Vonnegut’s career, but he continued to write novels including Breakfast of Champions (1973) and Deadeye Dick (1982); plays, notably Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970); and non-fiction until shortly before his death in 2007.