page_title: Kurt Vonnegut
section_title: War
hierarchical_section_title: Kurt Vonnegut / Views / War
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a picture of Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis, IN
context_page_description: Kurt Vonnegut Jr was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, bestselling novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
  Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He later adopted his sister's sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.
  Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952.
context_section_description: In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut recounts meeting filmmaker Harrison Starr at a party who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—"I guess" replied Vonnegut. Starr responded "Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel?". This underlined Vonnegut's belief that wars were, unfortunately, inevitable, but that it was important to ensure the wars one fought were just wars.
  In 2011, NPR wrote, "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview that, "my own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. 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", made by "Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday (1991) that "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima".
  Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Piano, the 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 Cradle, John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.
caption: A large painting of Vonnegut on Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis, blocks away from the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and the Rathskeller, which was designed by his family's architecture firm.
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