Kurt Vonnegut
11 November: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is born in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father is an architect and his mother is the daughter of a brewer. KV is the youngest of their three children.
The Great Depression causes Kurt Sr.'s architectural business to collapse, and his mother begins abusing alcohol and opiods. They sell the family home and KV is taken from Orchard School, a private school where he met Jane Cox in kindergarten. She and KV will later marry.
KV attends Shortridge High School, where he writes for the student newspaper, The Echo.
KV attends Cornell University, majoring in biochemistry at the insistence of his father, although he did not like the field. He becomes the Managing Editor of the student paper, The Cornell Daily Sun. Here KV learns the simple rules of journalism that will influence all his literary works: Get the facts right, compose straightforward declarative sentences, and know the audience. He is a member of ROTC, but his bad grades and his authorship of a satirical article cause him to lose his commission.
KV drops out of Cornell and enlists in the Army. He reports to Fort Bragg for Basic Training in March. He is trained in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Specialized Training Program.
The Army Specialized Training Program is cancelled because soldiers are needed for D-Day. KV is ordered to an infantry battalion at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis in Edinburgh, Indiana, where he is trained as a scout and can go home on weekends.
14 May: KV comes home to celebrate Mother’s Day, but finds his mother dead by suicide (an overdose of sleeping pills).
December: KV fights in the Battle of the Bulge, the final German offensive of the war. During the battle, KV's division is overrun by advancing German armored forces. Over 500 members of the division are killed and over 6,000, including KV, are captured.
KV, as a POW, is taken to the German city of Dresden, where he lives in a slaughterhouse. He works in a factory that makes malt syrup for pregnant women.
13 February: British and American bombers destroy the city of Dresden by dropping high explosives followed by incendiary bombs. The resulting fires turn the non-militarized city into one huge conflagration. Estimates of the number of civilians killed vary widely, from a low of 22,700 to a high of 250,000. Most historians agree on a number between 25,000 and 45,000. The estimate is complicated by the fact that there were over 300,000 refugees from the Eastern front in the city at the time. KV and his fellow POWs survive through sheer chance, because they were housed 60 feet underground, in the meat locker of the former slaughterhouse.
KV's job, for weeks after the bombing, is to gather up and burn the remains of the dead. This experience at Dresden marks him for life and eventually results in his literary masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five.
After General George S. Patton captures Leipzig, the American POWs are evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia, where they are abandoned by their guards. With the help of the Russians KV gets to a camp for repatriating POWs, then back to Indianapolis, where he finishes his tour of duty and is awarded the Purple Heart.
1 September: KV marries Jane Cox.
KV enters the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology.
KV takes a job in public relations job with General Electric, in their Schenectady, New York, research laboratory. He begins writing short fiction at night.
KV and Jane have their first child, Mark, in May.
Daughter, Edith, is born
KV has his first piece, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," published in the February 11 issue of Collier's, for which he receives $750.
KV gives up corporate life to pursue writing full-time. The family moves to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Player Piano, his first novel, is published. It is set in a dystopian near future, when cybernetic automation has effectively separated people into two castes, the "engineers and managers" and the remainder of the population, who can find work only in "recycling and reclamation" or the largely useless military. An underground revolutionary movement arises with the intention of rolling back those changes and giving the masses the dignity of owning their own productive work. The New York Times gives it a favorable review.
KV's third child, Nanette, is born.
KV’s sister Alice Adams dies of cancer, just two days after her husband is killed in a commuter train crash. KV and Jane take in three of Alice’s children, doubling the size of their family overnight. KV tries to open a Saab dealership in Cape Cod, but it is bankrupt within the year.
The Sirens of Titan is published. In it, a militarized civilization from Mars invades Earth, and all the events of human history are determined by a race of robotic aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who need a replacement part that can only be produced by an advanced civilization in order to repair their spaceship and return home. They have manipulated all of human history in order to produce it.
Mother Night is published, but receives little attention. The protagonist is an American who goes to Nazi Germany during WWII as a double agent for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. He rises to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the war, the OSS refuses to clear his name, and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann, and later commits suicide.
Cat's Cradle is KV's first popular novel. It is a Cold War parody in which "Ice-Nine" replaces nuclear weapons as the tool for humanity's self-destruction.
In these books, KV worked out what will eventually become his trademark: a dark comic voice coupled with a , making his audience laugh despite the horrors he described.
While his previous books created a bit of a cult following among college students for KV, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death brings him mainstream success.
This is the peak of the Vietnam War (fought between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam between 1954 and 1975; the United States was an ally of South Vietnam) in a year when protests against the war were rampant across the United States. The novel was embraced by the antiwar movement for its criticism of government indifference and senseless brutality. It resonated with soldiers who were returning from the battlefields of southeast Asia.
This book is at once an anti-war novel, a piece of science fiction, a piece of metafiction, and a lightning rod for controversy. It presents the life of Billy Pilgrim, who has come unstuck in time and travels back and forth through his life and his experiences in World War II. He is kidnapped by aliens who teach him that time is continuous and that life goes on forever in some form or another. Vonnegut used his own experiences in WWII and as a POW to create the significant events of Billy Pilgrim's life. Vonnegut looks back open-eyed at his Dresden experiences, and writes a funny, eloquent, and heartbreaking plea for human beings to remember their basic humanity.
Slaughterhouse-Five is nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards. It loses both to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. It has since been widely regarded as a classic anti-war novel, and has appeared in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.
KV and Jane separate; KV moves to New York City. Their relationship was never smooth, and they will eventually divorce.
By the early 1970s, Vonnegut is one of the most famous living writers on earth. Yet he bcomes withdrawn and depressed and suffers from writer’s block. His son, Mark, suffers a bipolar disorder breakdown early in the decade, but recovers to write a book about it, The Eden Express.
The disintegration of families becomes a major theme in Vonnegut’s two novels in the middle 1970s. This year brought Breakfast of Champions, a satire of American culture where a car dealer takes fiction for reality and is pushed over the edge. In it, KV is attempting to come to terms with the long-ago suicide of his mother and death of his father, as well as his own pessimism and suicidal impulses. Vonnegut critiques racial, economic, and gender inequality in America, and he exposes the damage that Americans have done to their environment.
KV accepts a position teaching creative writing at the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor of English Prose. He resigns next year.
Slapstick, his eighth novel, is about a pair of genius "Neanderthaloid" twins who become dullards when separated from each other. KV meant it to metaphorically represent Vonnegut’s relationship with his sister, Alice. While not altogether successful as fiction, these books help Vonnegut work through the emotional problems that have plagued him since childhood. If Breakfast of Champions was Vonnegut’s attempt to come to terms with the deaths of his parents, Slapstick is a novel that mourns the loss of his sister Alice from cancer in 1958.
KV and Jane divorce. KV marries his girlfriend of several years, Jill Krementz, a photographer.
KV turns to social realism with Jailbird, a novel about corporate and governmental corruption following a lowly bureaucrat from the Watergate scandal.
Struggling with depression, KV attempts suicide.
In Galapagos, the last humans on earth are stranded on an island where they slowly (de)-evolve. KV expresses concerns that the "oversized human brain" was ironically leading humanity to possible extinction.
In Bluebeard KV picks up a minor character from Breakfast of Champions, and creates a satire on art and its commercialization.
In a collection of essays, Fates Worse than Death, KV reflects on his growing disappointment and disllusionment with humanity:
"for whatever reason, American humorists or satirists or whatever you want to call them, those who choose to laugh rather than weep about demoralizing information, become intolerably unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age.
KV publishes his final novel, Timequake, and retires from fiction writing. In it he expresses his sense that corporate greed, overpopulation, and war would win out in the end over simple humanity. He includes this apology to future generations: "We could have saved the world, but we were just too damned lazy."
For the last decade of his life, he continues to try to be, as he says, “a responsible elder in our society,” decrying the militarization of our county after the terrorist attacks of 2001.
KV nearly dies in a small fire in his Manhattan brownstone, that appeared to be the result of the his carelessness in smoking his unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes. He is rescued by a neighbor and by his teenage daughter Lily, and spends several days in the hospital in critical condition, suffering from smoke inhalation.
11 April: KV dies after a fall on the steps of his New York brownstone.
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.