It has been said that a person is the sum total of all of his or her experiences. Validity of this quote is evident in the writing of Kurt Vonnegut, who some describe as such. Living through the Great Depression and serving in World War II gave him a profound perspective that he poured into his work. The happiness and sadness, the hate and camaraderie, the wealth and poverty, and the peace and war of the time are all felt with crystal clarity through the work of Kurt Vonnegut.
He was a man of fairly humble beginnings. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born on November 11, 1922 (Armistice Day) in Indianapolis, Indiana (1). His last name, Vonnegut, was derived from a stream in Germany called the Vonne, and pays tribute to his German ancestry. He had two siblings, Bernard and Alice, who were born in 1914 and 1917, respectively (5). His parents, Kurt senior and Edith Sophia Vonnegut, were at one time quite wealthy (1). His father was an architect, the son of the first architect to be granted a license in the state of Indiana (3). Kurt senior enjoyed a substantial success in his profession until the 1930s and the Great Depression. Young Kurt Vonnegut was forced to attend public schools as opposed to his siblings, who had attended private schools (1).
Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1940. From there he applied to and was accepted at Cornell University (1). At the urging of is parents, particularly his father, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry. His main interest, though, was always writing. While at Cornell he worked as the manager of the school’s paper, the Cornell Daily Sun (2).
Biochemistry had never really appealed to Vonnegut, as it had been his father’s idea to go into science in the first place. In 1943, when Cornell began contemplating whether or not to expel Vonnegut due to a lack of effort in his school work, Vonnegut threw in the towel on school all together and enlisted in the Army (3). At this point the Allies’ campaign against the Nazis had reached a high level of intensity. Vonnegut was sent to fight the Germans on their own turf.
Kurt senior and Edith Sophia had never quite adjusted to their rung on the social ladder after their economic plunge during the Great Depression. They had become dispassionate and apathetic, and by 1944 they had pretty much given up on life. On May 14, 1944, the day before Kurt junior would return home on leave from the Army for Mother’s Day, Edith Sophia Vonnegut committed suicide by taking an overdose of a sleeping medication that had been prescribed to her (1). This tragedy was pivotal in the formation of young Kurt’s outlook on life and the beliefs he put into his writing. His father never recovered from his wife’s death. He lived on despondently until his death on October 1, 1957 (3).
Returning to his duties in the war, Vonnegut fought in the infamous Battle of the Bulge as an infantry scout. On December 14, 1944, he was captured and sent to a German POW camp. He spent the remainder of the war laboring for the Germans in a vitamin-producing factory in Dresden, Germany. On February 13, 1945, the Allied Forces began firebombing the city of Dresden. Vonnegut survived the bombing by being sheltered in an underground meat locker where he was quartered with other POWs (1). The experience influenced him significantly and would later be the pseudo-premise for one of his most famous books, Slaughterhouse Five.
Vonnegut was repatriated on May 22, 1945 (3). On September 1st of that same year he married Jane Marie Cox, a woman he had known since they were both in kindergarten in Indianapolis. Needing a new direction to his life, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student of anthropology (1). While in school, he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. To his great disappointment, Vonnegut’s Master’s thesis was rejected by the university and he did not obtain his degree. Sensing that anthropology was perhaps not the particular route he was intended for, Vonnegut moved his family to Schenectedy, New York, where he was employed as a publicist for General Electric.
It was in this place and time that Vonnegut’s career as a writer of fiction began. On February 11, 1950, a magazine called Collier’s Weekly published “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It was a short story and Vonnegut’s first published work of science fiction. From then on short stories by Vonnegut began appearing in a wide variety of periodicals (3).
By the end of the next year Vonnegut was making enough money from his published stories to quit his job at General Electric and focus on his writing full time. He moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1952 his work paid off when his first novel, Player Piano, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York (4).
Firmly established as a writer of fiction, Vonnegut’s name began to be synonymous with modern, intuitive, forward-thinking writing. In 1954 he took a job teaching English at the Hopefield School on Cape Cod, an institution for emotionally disturbed children. He continued in this position until 1956. The two years after proved to be emotionally difficult for Vonnegut. They included the death of his father on October 1, 1957 and the death of his sister, Alice, in 1958 (4). In a tragic instance of divine coincidence, his sister’s death from cancer occurred within mere hours of her husband’s death in a train crash, leaving their three children, James, Stephen, and Kurt Adams, parentless. Not wanting his nephews to be raised by someone outside the family, Vonnegut adopted these children (1).
Maintaining composure through these life-altering events, and perhaps drawing inspiration from a silver lining unseeable to most people, Vonnegut’s next several years were marked with success. In the six years between 1959 and 1965, Vonnegut published five books, including “Sirens of Titan,” “Canary in a Cat House,” “Mother Night,” his most popular work “Cat’s Cradle,” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” (4). These books were met with intrigue by the public, who found Vonnegut to be a profound commentator on our rapidly modernizing society.
In 1967 Vonnegut took a nostalgic trip to Dresden, Germany, where he had been imprisoned and survived the bombing that had killed 130,000 others (4). His experiences during World War II had been very formative to the course of his life and his views on society, views that had become popularized through his work and accepted as insightful by the public. Much of the inspiration for his work had come from what he’d learned in the war about the nature of things, which gave his writing its dark, foreboding quality.
At this point Vonnegut decided to slightly change what he was doing in his work. In 1970 he spent a brief period teaching creative writing at Harvard, and later that year finished writing a play called “Happy Birthday, Wanda June” for the Broadway stage. In 1971 he finally received his Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, due more to his popularity and success as an author that his effort towards getting it. The board had decided that “Cat’s Cradle” could serve as a thesis to replace the rejected one, and felt this completed Vonnegut’s course in anthropology (4).
Vonnegut moved to New York in 1971. A little later, in 1972, his son Mark suffered a schizophrenic breakdown and had to be treated. This incident served as Vonnegut’s inspiration for his book The Eden Express, published later in 1972. Additionally, Vonnegut became vice president of the P.E.N. American Center and a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, both in 1972. Having returned to writing novels, Vonnegut wrote “Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons,” which was published in 1974 (4). In 1979, he divorced his wife Jane of thirty-four years (1). Since then, he has written and published “Galapagos” in 1985, “Bluebeard” in 1987, “Fates Worse Than Death” in 1991, which has been described as autobiographical, “Timequake” in 1997, and “God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian” in 2000 (6).
Kurt Vonnegut was the living embodiment of his time. His life is a testament to both the difficulties and the triumphs of those times. His legacy is one of hope to others whose lives are fraught with unexplained tragedy and undeserved hardship, that they may eventually be blessed with unexpected success. His work, both light and dark, happy and sad, literal and fantastic, comically humorous and brutally real, perfectly preserves his insightful genius.
Works Cited
1. “Kurt Vonnegut.” Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Man. ed. Scot Peacock. Vol. 44. Missouri: Gale Group, Inc., 2002. 205-216.
2. Kurt Vonnegut Homepage. Reed, Peter. 1999. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida. 5 May 2005. .
3. Marek Vit’s Kurt Vonnegut Corner. Berggoetz, Glenn. 6 April 1998. 6 May 2005. .
4. Klinkowitz, Jerome and Donald L. Lawler. Vonnegut in America. New York, New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1977.
5. Giannone, Richard. Vonnegut. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press Corp., 1977.
6. NC Wise Owl. Scholastic Library Publishing, 2005. 15 May 2005.
