patriotism. Thus, they never taught their youngest son German or introduced him to German literature and tradition, leaving him feeling "ignorant and rootless".[3][4] Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper for the first ten years of his life, for raising him and giving him values. "[She] gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to me. So she was as great an influence on me as anybody." Vonnegut described Young as "humane and wise", adding that "the compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs" came from her.[5]The financial security and social prosperity that the Vonneguts once enjoyed were destroyed in a matter of years. The Liebers's brewery was closed in 1921 after the advent ofProhibition in the United States. When the Great Depression hit, few people could afford to build, causing clients at Kurt, Sr.'s architectural firm to become scarce.[6] Vonnegut's brother and sister had finished their primary and secondary educations in private schools, but Vonnegut was placed in a public school, called Public School No. 43, now known as the James Whitcomb Riley High School.[7] He was not bothered by this,[a] but both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune. His father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a "dreamy artist".[9] His mother became depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and abusive. She labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said she expressed hatred "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid" for her husband.[10] Edith Vonnegut forayed into writing and tried to sell short stories to magazines like Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post with no success.[3]High school and Cornell[edit]Kurt Vonnegut in his 1940Shortridge High School yearbookVonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936. While there, he played clarinet in the school band and became an editor for the Tuesday edition of the school newspaper, The Shortridge Echo. Vonnegut said his tenure with the Echo allowed him to write for a large audiencehis fellow studentsrather than for a teacher, an experience he said was "fun and easy".[1] "It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people", Vonnegut observed. "Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it." For him, that was writing.[7]After graduating from Shortridge in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He wanted to study the humanities or become an architect like his father, but his father[b] and brother, a scientist, urged him to study a "useful" discipline.[1] As a result, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, but he had little proficiency in the area and was indifferent towards his studies.[12] As his father had been a member at MIT,[13] Vonnegut was entitled to join the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and did.[14] He overcame stiff competition for a place at the university's independent newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor.[15][16] By the end of his freshman year, he was writing a column titled "Innocents Abroad" which reused jokes from other publications. He later penned a