Slaughterhouse 5 - Book Report Title: Slaughterhouse Five Author: Kurt Slaughterhouse 5 Slaughterhouse 5 - Book Report Title: Slaughterhouse Five... SCHOOL View Full Document Book Report Title: Slaughterhouse Five Author: Kurt Vonnegut Year written: 1969 Literary period/era: Post-Modern The author and his times: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was an American author who gained worldwide fame thanks to his often humorist and satirical novels, of which he wrote fourteen, and of which Slaughterhouse- Five became his most famous and best-selling. Born in November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana to a family of three children, in which he was the youngest, the Vonnegut family was mainly of German descent. Ironically, his family decided to exclude their future generations from German culture because of the hatred developed towards the country’s decisions during WWI. According to him, this decision from his family made him a bit ignorant since he has been robbed of an important part of his life.

This can arguably be seen in “Slaughterhouse Five” in the fact that Vonnegut does not antagonize the Germans like his family taught him to, but rather generalized criticism towards all of humanity for wars and disruption to peace. Vonnegut’s passion for writing began while in high school. He volunteered as editor for his school’s newspaper edition, which made him realize writing was not only his passion but his talent. This realization followed him to school when he enrolled in Cornell University, where he initially majored in the scientific field in hopes of doing something that could be financially stable. He then proceeded to volunteer for the university’s newspaper, which he used to develop This preview has intentionally blurred sections. Sign up to view the full version. View Full Document his writing personality by mainly opposing U.S. intervention in WWII. Obviously, the book has been recognized as one of the great anti-war novels of the last century, fact that goes hand to hand to his pacifism in his college days. Considering Vonnegut criticized U.S. intervention in WWII, following the Pearl Harbor attack, he voluntarily enlisted in the army after the possibility of being drafted because of his poor grades in school became imminent.

To make things short, the bombing of Dresden and everything revolving around that event, such as the American prisoner of wars detained in a slaughterhouse in that same city and the low input of the city to the German war efforts were not only true but based upon real life events in his life. The difficulty the narrator, Yon Yonson, had in writing a book about the Dresden bombing was also true to Vonnegut’s life. Whther he did on purpose or not, the distrust generated by the poor management of the Vietnam War from the US government made for the anti-war message of the novel to resonate to an even greater extent that normally expected. With great fame came great responsibility. As expected from a book listed in the American Library Association’s list of 110 best novels of the 20 th century, he lectured in different prestigious colleges, spoke at different rallies, and traveled the country to spread his ideas to a broader audience. After the release of “Slaughterhouse Five” his life suffered some ups and downs, but his status as one of the main counterculture authors remains static. His tally reached This is the end of the preview. Sign up to access the rest of the document.

TERM Effect of Monarchies upon English Literature Historically, England has had an extensi Monarchies Slaughterhouse-Five - So You Have to Read a Classic So You Have to Read a Classic... By Kurt Vonnegut (American, born 1922) Published in 1969 Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Don't let the ease of reading fool you - Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.

One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters." Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. It fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy - and humor. Kurt Vonnegut - Author - Biography.com Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut was an American author best known for the novels Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

IN THESE GROUPS “I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.” Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut - Mini Biography (TV-14; 3:20) A short biography of Kurt Vonnegut whose blend of black comedy and wild imagination in works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle" made him one of the most loved writers of all time. Synopsis Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922. Vonnegut emerged as a novelist and essayist in the 1960s, and penned the classics Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions before 1980. He is known for his satirical literary style, as well as the science-fiction elements in much of his work. Vonnegut died in New York City on April 11, 2007. Early Life Born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kurt Vonnegut is considered one of the most influential American novelists of the twentieth century.

He blended literature with science fiction and humor, the absurd with pointed social commentary. Vonnegut created his own unique world in each of his novels and filled them with unusual characters, such as the alien race known as the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). After studying at Cornell University from 1940 to 1942, Kurt Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was sent by the Army to what is now Carnegie Mellon University to study engineering in 1943. The next year, he served in Europe and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After this battle, Vonnegut was captured and became a prisoner of war. He was in Dresden, Germany, during the Allied firebombing of the city and saw the complete devastation caused by it. Vonnegut himself escaped harm only because he, along with other POWs, was working in an underground meat locker making vitamin supplements. Soon after his return from the war, Kurt Vonnegut married his high school girlfriend, Jane Marie Cox. The couple had three children.

He worked several jobs before his writing career took off, including newspaper reporter, teacher, and public relations employee for General Electric. The Vonneguts also adopted his sister's three children after her death in 1958. Writing Debut Showing Vonnegut's talent for satire, his first novel, Player Piano, took on corporate culture and was published in 1952. More novels followed, including The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), and Cat's Cradle (1963). War remained a recurring element in his work, and one of his best-known works, Slaughterhouse-Five, draws some of its dramatic power from his own experiences. The narrator, Billy Pilgrim, is a young soldier who becomes a prisoner of war and works in an underground meat locker, not unlike Vonnegut, but with a notable exception: Pilgrim begins to experience his life out of sequence and revisits different times repeatedly. He also has encounters with the Tralfamadorians. This exploration of the human condition mixed with the fantastical struck a chord with readers, giving Vonnegut his first best-selling novel.

Further Success Emerging as a new literary voice, Kurt Vonnegut became known for his unusual writing style—long sentences and little punctuation—as well as his humanist point of view. He continued writing short stories and novels, including Breakfast of Champions (1973), Jailbird (1979) and Deadeye Dick (1982). Vonnegut even made himself the subject of Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981). Despite his success, Kurt Vonnegut wrestled with his own personal demons. Having struggled with depression on and off for years, he attempted to take his own life in 1984. Whatever challenges he faced personally, Vonnegut became a literary icon with a devoted following. He counted writers such as Joseph Heller, another WWII veteran, as his friends. Later Years His last novel was Timequake (1997), which became a best seller despite receiving mixed reviews. Kurt Vonnegut chose to spend his later years working on nonfiction. His last book was A Man Without a Country, a collection of biographical essays. In it, he expressed his views on politics and art, and shed more light on his own life.

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84, as a result of head injuries sustained in a fall at his home in New York a few weeks earlier. He was survived by his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz, their adopted daughter, Lily, and six children from his first marriage. Related Videos Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us ! Citation Information Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut - Author Biography • Education—Cornell University; Carnegie Institute of Technology; Univeristy of Tennessee; M.A., University of Chicago • Died—April 11, 2007 • Where—New York, New York Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th-century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical leftist intellectual.

He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. Early Years Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith (Lieber). Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut, Sr. was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis institution. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated into Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. On Mothers' Day in 1944, when Vonnegut was 21, his mother committed suicide with sleeping pills.

World War II Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away. While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison.

Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them. Vonnegut eventually remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes." Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound," later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".

Post-War Career After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student. According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th Century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. Vonnegut was a technical writer, but was also known for writing well past his typical hours while working. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus...and rented an upstairs apartment located across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department, where he was an active Volunteer Fire-Fighter for a few years. To this day, the apartment where Vonnegut lived still has a desk at which he wrote many of his short stories; Vonnegut carved his name on its underside.

The University of Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971. In the mid-1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine. On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time and the Modern Library. Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod, where he managed the first Saab dealership established in the U.S. Personal Life The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut.

His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation. After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz. Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized. He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; three of his sister Alice's four children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer; and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz.

His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, wrote two books, one about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery, and one which includes anecdotes of growing up as his father was a struggling writer, his subsequent illness and a more recent breakdown in 1985, and what life has been like since then. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint. Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven, and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed on September 15 in the Newark Bay rail crash when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother—Kurt's sister Alice—died of cancer.

In Slapstick, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself, and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama, as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress. Vonnegut's first wife Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky and wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book Angels Without Wings: A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy. A lifelong smoker, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide." On November 11, 1999, an asteroid was named in Vonnegut's honor: 25399 Vonnegut. Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 after falling down a flight of stairs in his home and suffering massive head trauma.

Writing Career Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" appeared in the February 11, 1950 edition of Collier's (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959. Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device. These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself, as a deus ex machina. Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays. Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels.

It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character. In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused". In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it. In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine (a central wampeter in his novel Cat's Cradle). With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction.

He continued to write for the magazine In These Times, where he was a senior editor, until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U. S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters. The April 2008 issue of Playboy featured the first published excerpt from Armageddon in Retrospect, the first posthumous collection of Vonnegut's work. It included never before published short stories by the writer and a letter that was written to his family during World War II when Vonnegut was captured as a prisoner of war. The book also contains drawings by Vonnegut and a speech he wrote shortly before his death. The introduction was written by his son, Mark Vonnegut. Vonnegut also taught at Harvard University, where he was a lecturer in English, and the City College of New York, where he was a Distinguished Professor.

Art Career Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for Slaughterhouse-Five and developed with Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, which he pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III. Politics Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus and Eugene Debs Metzger in Deadeye Dick) and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos). He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union and was featured in a print advertisement for them. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction.

Though the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in Jailbird (1979), would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the administration. His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian. Though he was a dissident to the end, Vonnegut held a bleak view on the power of artists to effect change. "During the Vietnam War," he told an interviewer in 2003, "every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high." Religion Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic, freethinker, humanist, Unitarian Universalist, agnostic, and atheist. He disbelieved in the supernatural, considered religious doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash," and believed people were motivated by loneliness to join religions.

Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought, and advocated it in various writings, speeches and interviews. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007. Vonnegut was at one time a member of a Unitarian congregation. Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars. While he often identified himself as an agnostic or atheist, he also frequently spoke of God. Despite describing freethought, humanism and agnosticism as his "ancestral religion," and despite being a Unitarian, he also spoke of himself as being irreligious.

A press release by the American Humanist Association described him as "completely secular." (Adapted from Wikipedia.) Kurt Vonnegut (Author of Slaughterhouse-Five) Fiction , Short Stories , Science Fiction Influences edit data Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003. He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II. After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing st Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist.

He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003. He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II. After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing style to his reporting work. His experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work. This event would also form the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, the book which would make him a millionaire.

This acerbic 200-page book is what most people mean when they describe a work as "Vonnegutian" in scope. Vonnegut was a self-proclaimed humanist and socialist (influenced by the style of Indiana's own Eugene V. Debs) and a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The novelist is known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) ...more Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Biography (Writer) Died: 11 April 2007 (brain injury) Birthplace: Indianapolis, Indiana Best known as: The author of Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut wrote dozens of satirical novels whose central theme was life's cosmic joke on humanity. A modern-day Mark Twain , right down to the bushy mustache and black humor, Vonnegut was often called a science fiction author, but more often he used the cloak of sci-fi as a means to deliver his cranky-but-funny deliberations on the human condition.

His best-known books include Cat's Cradle (1963), Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Slapstick (1976). Many of his books featured a character named Kilgore Trout, a fictional author who was something of an alter-ego for Vonnegut himself. Kurt Vonnegut was a World War II veteran who survived prisoner-of-war camps and the American bombing of Dresden, Germany, events that informed much of his fiction. Vonnegut was an especially fashionable author in the late 1960s and 1970s; his once-daring satire lost its literary luster in later years, but he continues to be popular with late teen and young adult readers. Extra credit: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s father was also named Kurt… Vonnegut was the unwitting subject of a famous Internet hoax in 1997: a list of whimsical advice for college graduates (which began with the admonition “Wear sunscreen”) was widely circulated via e-mail, and said to be the text of a Vonnegut commencement address at MIT.

In truth, Vonnegut had no connection with the essay. It was written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich … Venus on the Half-Shell, a real-life 1975 novel “by” Kilgore Trout, was written not by Vonnegut but by Philip Jose Farmer. Copyright © 1998-2017 by Who2?, LLC. All rights reserved. Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut In Popular Fiction in America, Beacham Publishing, 1987. Publishing History Kurt Vonnequt began writing for the Cornell Daily Sun as an undergraduate, and he continued to work as a reporter while studying anthropology at the University of Chicago after World War II. After taking a job in the public relations department at General Electric, Vonnegut began to publish stories in Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1950 this success encouraged him to quit his job with G.E. and to move to Barnstable, Cape Cod where he supported himself by publishing stories in science fiction magazines such as Galaxy and Fantasy.

Because of Vonnegut's reputation as a commercial science fiction writer, his first novels-- Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), and Mother Night (1962)--were published as paperbacks with lurid covers that misrepresented the novels and discouraged serious critical attention. The hardcover editions of Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) were a significant improvement, although they sold only a few thousand copies. In 1966-1967 all of his novels were reissued in paperback, and Vonnequt began to develop a substantial underground following, particularly among college students. But it was the publication of Slauqhterhouse-Five (1969) by Boston independent publisher Seymour Lawrence that changed Vonnegut's career. The novel's great popularity and broad critical acclaim focused new attention on his earlier work, and soon The Sirens of Titan had sold over 200,000 copies. From that point on anything with Vonnegut's name was virtually guaranteed success.

When he published the play Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971), Vonnegut stated that he was "through with novels," and he withheld Breakfast of Champions from publication. But he returned to the genre that had brought him his greatest success by releasing the novel in 1973 with an initial printing of 100,000 copies. He has since continued to publish novels as well as collections of autobiography, opinion, and nonfiction. Critical Reception, Honors, and Popularity Slaughterhouse-Five was a critical and personal breakthrough for Vonnequt, yet the extravagant praise afforded the novel has sometimes been turned against the author when his subsequent books have been dismissed as "cute" and "thin" in comparison. many critics continue to praise Vonnegut as a 'masterly stylist," a jazz improviser in prose, and an author who has reinvented the American novel, but others complain of his "coy rhetorical trickiness," oversimplification, and sentimentality.

one reviewer of Galapagos (1985) maintains that Vonnegut's "complacent detachment and sentimental cynicism have been fossilized for years." Another suggests that "Vonnegut's recent work has seemed fatigued, marred by sloppy writing." None of this, however, has diminished his continued popularity with the reading public, for each new offering has been an immediate bestseller. Vonnequt received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a literature award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970. In 1974 he was awarded an honorary LHD by Indiana University, and in 1975 he was named a vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Analysis of Selected Titles Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade, 1969.

Social Concerns Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden on February 13, 1945 when the city, a cultural center of no military value, was destroyed by Allied incendiary bombs, and in Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut, who was born on Armistice Day 1922, focuses on the particularly human madness of war. He consciously wanted to avoid writing a novel that glamorized the brutality of war, so as his subtitle suggests, he portrays wars as fought by young and uncomprehending innocents. He is equally appalled by a technology that can destroy 135,000 people in two hours, and the absence of an adequate moral response to such destruction. The novel, which was published as America was escalating its involvement in Southeast Asia and nightly newscasts were filled with body counts and bloody footage from the field, makes explicit and implicit references to Vietnam. This was also a time of widespread experimentation with mind-altering drugs. Thus, the novel's mixture of fantasy and anti-war philosophy made the book particularly relevant and popular.

Themes Slaughterhouse-Five describes man's inhumanity to man, and the mass destruction of Dresden by Allied forces serves as Vonnegut's primary example. Although a humanist at heart, Vonnegut repeatedly demonstrates the human aptitude for cruelty, and he shows how technology magnifies this cruelty beyond human control. At a deeper level the novel explores the moral vacuum in which contemporary human life exists. Vonnegut's outrage over Dresden was as much a result of the lack of attention given to this event as it was to the bloodshed, but there are no villains in Vonnegut's novels, and he fully recognizes the ambiguous connection between agent and victim. Thus, in one of the novel's many biblical allusions he sympathizes with Lot's wife who looks back at the destruction she is escaping before being turned to stone. Slaughterhouse-Five, which is about Vonnegut's effort to tell his story as much as it is about Billy Pilgrim, explores the ambiguous nature of communication, a recurrent theme in his work. In Mother Night Howard Campbell's Nazi propaganda broadcasts are also strategically coded messages to the Allies, messages that even he does not understand.

In the end it is uncertain whether his strategic assistance to the Allies has outweighed the moral support his broadcasts gave the Nazi regime. Accordingly, Vonnequt approached the narration of his war experiences cautiously, fearful that by retelling his adventures he would inadvertently glamorize war. The result is a mix of historical and fantastic perspectives that discourages suspension of disbelief. Finally, the novel explores the irreconcilable conflict between free will and determinism. Billy Pilgrim's motto--"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference"--is undercut by the narrator's comment that "among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." The book accepts the logic of Tralfamadorian determinism, but it is nevertheless clear that Vonnegut cannot excuse the fire-bombing of Dresden as fated, and although Billy Pilgrim escapes into the Tralfamadorian belief that the perpetual existence of all moments of time eliminates the negation of death, he still finds himself at times inexplicably shedding tears.

Characters As though to emphasize his vision of the life-denying nature of most modern existence, Vonnegut abandons the mimetic effort to develop character through motivation and causality. He explains that "there are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." Slaughterhouse-Five was Vonnegut's conscious leap toward a more personally revealing fiction. However, he directly presents himself as the spokesman only in the opening and closing chapters. Inside this autobiographical framework, the protagonist is Billy Pilgrim. Born in Vonnegut's version of Schenectady, New York (Ilium) in the year of Vonnegut's birth (1922), Billy also experiences the fire bombing of Dresden as a prisoner-of-war. He later marries Valencia Merble, becomes a successful optometrist, and fathers two children, including a Green-Beret son. Billy has been described as one of Vonnegut's "crucifieds, a passive, suffering character who fights brutality by shutting it out of his mind.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a self-consciousness novel, and Vonnegut tries to insure that his readers will remember that it is only a novel. He emphasizes the artificial nature of his book by populating it with characters from his earlier work: Eliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout, Howard Campbell, the Rumfoords, and the Tralfamadorians. Techniques On the title page Vonnegut says that Slauqhterhouse-Five is written in the "telegraphic schizophrenic manner" of the Tralfamadorians, a self-deprecatinq, but fairly accurate description of the author's nontraditional approach. Actually, Slaughterhouse-Five was the first broadly popular work to completely abandon traditional restrictions of linear time and fixed space. Billy Piqram's time travel is paralleled by Vonnegut's free movement through narrative time, mixing descriptions of historic Dresden and his personal wartime experiences with Tralfamadorian fantasy and bits from his earlier fiction to create fragments of meaning. Similarly, Vonnegut uses stream of consciousness to portray Billy's difficulty in fully adopting the Tralfamadorian objectivity toward the Dresden bombing and to underscore the inexplicable interrelatedness of experience.

Related Titles Just as Vonnegut mixes history and fantasy in Slaughterhouse-Five, he combines his new material with characters and references to his earlier fiction. The city of Ilium was the setting for Player Piano (1952); the Tralfamadorians were the central focus of The Sirens of Titan (1959); Howard Campbell was the protagonist of Mother Night (1961); and Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout return from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). The apocalyptic nature of Slaughterhouse-Five is echoed in many of Vonnegut's other works: In Mother Night Howard Campbell defends the holocaust; in Cat's Cradle the earth is destroyed by Dr. Hoenniker's ice-nine; in Deadeye Dick (1982) the citizens of Midland City are inadvertently killed by a neutron bomb; and Galapagos (1985) is narrated from a distant future long after man has been all but wiped out by an AIDS-like virus. Literary Precedents Slaughterhouse-Five's numerous references to other books emphasize the multiplicity of Vonnegut's vision.

The books, actual and fictional, that become part of Slaughterhouse-Five range from documentary studies such as The Bombing of Dresden and The Execution of Private Slovik through realistic portrayals such as Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage to Kilgore Trout's fantastic Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension . The stylistic conflict between these books echoes the novel's examination of fact, fancy, and the place of art in society. The protagonist's name suggests a connection with Bunyan's allegory, and like Bunyan's Christian, Billy is exposed to the evils of the world. Unlike Christian, however, Billy is not supported by the vision of a Celestial City at the end of his journey; instead he envisions the moment of his own death. Adaptations The film version of Slaughterhouse-Five, directed by George Roy Hill, starring Valerie Perrine, Michael Sacks, and Ron Leibman, with a screenplay by Stephen Geller, was released by Universal in 1972. The film won a special jury prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Breakfast of Champions , 1973. Social Concerns Breakfast of Champions is set in an America stripped of physical and spiritual beauty.

Before setting out on the darkly humorous journey to the heartland that takes him past various scenes of ecological and human destruction, Kilgore Trout cries out, "I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore." But when he arrives in Midland City, where antipersonnel bombs and body bags are manufactured, he is confronted by a garish array of fast-food restaurants and neon-lit motels divided by a vile stream called Sugar Creek. The interspersed historical notes, which rewrite American history as a tale of racist sea pirates, place these observations in a larger context, reminding the reader of the dark and paradoxical nature of American capitalism. The contradiction between the ideal of American independence and the actual carceral experience of Vonnegut's Americans is symbolized by Thomas Jefferson's ownership of slaves. In summary, the book reminds its readers of the continuing bloodshed in Vietnam, addresses Americans' increased concern over the ecological destruction of the planet, satirically explores the vacuity of American culture, questions the benefits of capitalism, and suggests that racism is central to the structure of American society.

Themes One important theme explored in Breakfast of Champions is the proper role of the artist, a particularly difficult question in a society so adept at transforming art into commodity and so immersed in the consoling fantasies supplied by Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood. By writing a self-conscious, anti-novel Vonnegut hopes to prevent his readers from trying to "live like people invented in story books." It is a reworking of a favorite Vonnegut theme, explicitly stated in the preface that was added to the 1966 reissue of Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." In Breakfast of Champions Dwayne Hoover, the man of property, is set against Kilgore Trout, the man of vision, and at the center of their confrontation is the question of free will. Near the end of Breakfast of Champions Hoover reads Trout's Now It Can Be Told which tells him that he is the only creature in the universe with free will and that other people are only robots. This message seems to confirm the alienation Hoover has experienced and encourages a psychotic binge of violence that leaves both of the principal characters physically and spiritually damaged.

Yet in Breakfast of Champions there is some hope for melioration. Although experiential evidence indicates that life is mechanistic, intuition suggests, in the words of the minimalist painter Rabo Karbekian, that there is an "unwavering and pure" 'immaterial core' in people, the "I am' to which all messages are sent." In this sense, Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut's attempt to define a new humanism, a world in which "we are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." The difficulty of true communication is repeatedly emphasized in the novel, as the author portrays trite conversations and failed efforts to express the truth. In one absurd example, Vonnegut records the bodily measurements of all the main characters, but the language used in Midland City is an equally meaningless amalgamation of clichés and ritualistic responses. Before he goes mad, Dwayne Hoover starts repeating the last words spoken to him, but the citizens of Midland City do not notice the change. The book shows that faulty communication can be dangerous too.

After Hoover's rampage "it shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world--in the form of bad ideas." Yet, when Trout sees "What is the purpose of life?" scrawled on a men's room wall, he immediately answers, "to be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool." Characters The characters in Breakfast of Champions are puppets, and Vonnequt makes sure that his reader is aware of their artificiality. Like Robbe-Grillet, Vonnegut believes that the novel of character is dead, so Breakfast of Champions is filled with cartoon figures who can be adequately described with a single identifying phrase, but Vonnegut also fears that actual human beings are little more than robots leading determined existences. This depressing view of character is tempered in the novel by the minimalist painter Rabo Karabekian. In defense of his abstract painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Karabekian passionately argues that "our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery." In God Bless You Mr.

Rosewater Kilgore Trout was the pathetic science fiction hack, a vision of what Vonnegut had feared he might become. In Breakfast of Champions he is a visionary who accepts the invitation to appear at the Midland City Arts Festival in order to confront Americans' romantic notions of art with his own experience of frustration and failure. Dwayne Hoover, the "hero of this book' is a businessman whose wife has killed herself with Drano, whose lover is scarred by the death of her husband in Vietnam, and whose son is a homosexual. Until he reads Trout's "explanation," Hoover, despite having followed the path of success, leads a life of mystifying loneliness and despair. Techniques Written after a brief-lived rejection of prose, the novel is a conscious effort to break away from the successful formulas of his earlier writing. Vonnegut openly addresses himself in the role of creator "on a par with the Creator of the Universe," and with a Prospero-like gesture releases the characters from his earlier fiction. He also talks freely of his own personal experiences, including his mother's suicide and his relationship with his psychiatrist. The result is a colloquial anti-novel, a further break from the confines of realistic fiction.

Vonnegut undercuts suspense by revealing his plot in the first few chapters. In one of his numerous authorial intrusions, Vonnegut states that his purpose is to bring "chaos to order," to undercut his readers' comfortable expectations. Vonnegut freely ranges in time from 1492 forward into the future, saying that life is like an endless polymer without beginning or end. He stylistically emphasizes this notion of continuity by beginning many of his sentences with the word "And." In another rebellion against the order of realistic fiction, he makes no effort to dish out moral justice; the good and the evil suffer equally. Other technical experiments in Breakfast for Champions derive from pop art. Vonnegut's felt-tip-pen illustrations reduce experience to its inexorable essence while parodying Americans' tendency to accept simplistic, commercial versions of reality. Their crudeness mocks a culture that rewards efficiency more than truth, as did the original hardcover edition of the novel, which was packaged to resemble a box of cereal.

Related Titles Although Vonnegut frees his characters in Breakfast of Champions, several are recalled in later books: In the Prologue to Jailbird (1976), Vonnequt announces that "Kilgore Trout is back again. He could not make it on the outside"; Deadeye Dick (1982) is set in Midland City in the years prior to Kilgore Trout's disastrous visit and describes many of the same characters; The ghost of Leon Trotsky Trout, the son of Kilgore Trout, narrates Galapagos (1985) from a distant future long after humanity has extinguished itself. Literary Precedents Perhaps the most important literary precedent is The Tempest, Shakespeare's symbolic exploration of the role of the artist. Like Shakespeare, Vonnegut explores the ambiguous connection between the real and the invented, questions the authority of the artist, and considers the paradox of freedom. In a Prospero-like gesture, he frees his literary thralls at the novel's end although he cannot grant them the happiness and immortality they want. Cat's Cradle , 1963.

Social Concerns Cat's Cradle, published in the wake of the Cold War weapons buildup and the tensions of the Cuban missile crisis, focuses on man's ability to destroy life on earth. The narrator sets out to write a book The Day the Earth Ended about the Hiroshima bombing, but soon his background research into Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the creators of the atomic bomb, and his family, shifts the focus of the story to the new apocalypse brought on by his discovery of ice-nine, a substance that causes any water it contacts to freeze at 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Themes In Cat's Cradle Vonnegut brought together themes from his first three novels: the threat of technology from Player Piano, the question of free will from The Sirens of Titan , and the problem of communication from Mother Night. The overriding theme of Cat's Cradle is the narrator's warning that if technological advancement continues without a concurrent growth in ethical awareness, annihilation of the human race is a real possibility. This, of course, parallels the biblical story of Jonah who so vividly prophesies the destruction of Ninevah that the city repents and is spared by God.

As in other books Vonnegut shows that intellect harbors the temptation to rule over life, death, and nature, and he hopes that his novel will have the cautionary effect of Jonah's prophecy. The confrontation between technology and morality is represented in the book by the two primary settings: Ilium, New York is the city of science, a world of materialistic absolutism in which scientists create in a moral vacuum; San Lorenzo is an island of belief, a tyrannic and hopelessly impoverished island nation in which the religion of Bokononism has been created to provide "dynamic tension" that will distract the people from the oppression and material suffering that mark their lives. The book also shows how lies can overcome truth.

Bokonism's purpose is to "provide people with better and better lies," lies that will keep them from seeing the Hobbesian truth, that "life was as short and brutish and mean as ever." This view justifies fiction and art, yet Vonnegut cannot easily resolve the "cruel paradox of Bokonist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it." The uncertainty of truth is emphasized in the biblical parallel, for when God spared Ninevah he made Jonah's prophecy a lie. Characters John, the novel's narrator, opens by echoing Moby-Dick with the line, "Call me Jonah," an allusion that connects him with the biblical story of rebellion and suffering as well as with Melville's Ishmael, a prophet tempered by affliction. Like Melville's narrator, John's function is to observe, and he remains after the apocalypse to tell the tale. Other characters in the novel exhibit various forms of deception. Dr. Hoenikker epitomizes self-deceived intellect untempered by human feelings.

His misshapen children (the amoral Franklin, the horse-faced giantess Angela, and the dwarf Newt) are love-starved indications of his disinterest in humans. Dr. Asa Breed is a spokesman for the spirit-crushing marriage between science and industry that transforms truth into commodity. Papa Monzano, San Lorenzo's brutal dictator, threatens Bokonists with torture and death, but secretly works with Bokonon, a cynical American named Lionel Boyd Johnson who established his phony religion as a means of controlling the people. Techniques Some critics have dismissed Cat's Cradle as a thin summation of the three books preceding it, but technically the novel marks some significant changes for Vonnegut. The fragmentary effect of 127 chapters, short units of prose often structured as three-line jokes, marked the beginning of Vonnegut's subsequent method. It is also a book marked by irony. The book is cautionary, even prophetic, but it also makes fun of prophets.

In keeping with its warning to beware of the ascendancy of lies, the novel ends with the statement that "Nothing in this book is true." Literary Precedents Most obviously, Cat's Cradle uses the Book of Jonah and Moby-Dick. This levianthic motif is broadened by references to Hobbes and in descriptions of the landscape--the highest mountain in San Lorenzo looks like a "blue whale". Some critics have compared the novel to prophetic works such as Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Swift's Tale of a Tub, and others have concentrated on its place in the tradition of dystopian literature. However, Cat's Cradle is also a mock-apocalyptic novel that reacts to the popularity of books such as Seven Days in May and On the Beach. Other Titles Player Piano , 1952 (novel); The Sirens of Titan , 1959 (novel); Mother Night , 1961 (novel); Canary in a Cat House , 1961 (stories); God Bless You, Mr.

Rosewater, 1965 (novel); Welcome to the Monkey House , 1968 (stories); Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons , 1974 (nonfiction collection); Slapstick, 1974 (novel); Jailbird, 1976 (novel); Palm Sunday , 1981 (autobiographical collage); Deadeye Dick 1982, (novel); Galapagos , 1985 (novel). Additional Sources Goldsmith, David H. Kurt Vonnequt: Fantasies of Fire and Ice. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. Apocalypse in Vonnegut's writing. Giannone, Richard, Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels . Analyzes Vonnegut's novels, concentrating on his development as an artist. Klinkowitz, Jerome, Vonnegut . London: Methuen, 1982. Surveys nine of Vonnegut's novels, emphasizing his relationship to American culture. Klinkowitz, Jerome and John Somer, eds.

The Vonnegut Statement . New York: Delacorte, 1973. Collection of essays written to explain Vonnegut's popularity. Lundquist, James, Kurt Vonnegut . New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977. Argues for essential mid-western quality of Vonnegut's work. Reed, Peter J. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1972. Biography and analysis of novels through Slaughterhouse-Five. Schatt, Stanley, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Outlines the concurrent development of Vonnegut's style and epistemology. Tanner, Tony. "The Uncertain Messenger." City of Words. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 181-201. Examines the ambiguity and uncertainty of communication in Vonnegut's first five novels.

Kurt Vonnegut | Biography, Books and Facts [Cite This] Kurt Vonnegut One of the most influential American writers and novelists of the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut is best known for writing Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat’s Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973). His works are a blend of science, satire and black comedy. Vonnegut was also famous for his humanist beliefs and was the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. His writings have left a deep influence on the American literature of the 20th century. Vonnegut created his own unusual world in the novels he wrote making them a blend of literature, science fiction and humor accompanied with absurd social commentary. The novels were also filled with unusual characters such as the alien race known as the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). For two years beginning in 1940, Vonnegut studied at Cornell University after which he enlisted in the US army.

In 1943 the army sent him to study engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. A year later, he was sent to Europe where he fought and served in the Battle of the Bulge. Vonnegut was captured and made a prisoner of war during the battle. During this time, Vonnegut witnessed the devastation caused in the period of Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. He escaped the effects of destruction because he was working in an underground meat locker making vitamins with other prisoners of war. Upon his return from the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high school girlfriend with whom he had three children. The couple also adopted the three children of Vonnegut sister when she passed away in 1958. Before establishing himself as a writer, Vonnegut worked several jobs including newspaper reporter, teacher, and public relations employee for General Electric. In 1952, Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano which revolved around the theme of corporate culture. Player Piano was followed by more novels including The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), and Cat’s Cradle (1963).

War remained a common subject in many of Vonnegut’s works including his most acclaimed, Slaughterhouse-Five which derives a lot of drama from his own experiences at war. The novel became a bestseller due to its unique blend of fantasy, exploration of human condition and war. With more of his works being published, Kurt Vonnegut began to be recognized as an emerging talent and a new kind of literary voice. His unusual writing style, long sentences with little punctuation and humanist views gained him an increasing popularity. Continuing to write short stories and novels, Vonnegut produced more works such as Breakfast of Champions (1973), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982) and Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981). Despite becoming a successful novelist and a literary icon with a devoted following, Vonnegut struggled with an ongoing problem of depression. In 1984, Vonnegut tried to take his own life by making an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. Vonnegut’s last work of fiction, Timequake (1997) was also a bestseller.

Towards the end of his life, Vonnegut focused on writing non-fiction works. His last book was A Man Without a Country, a collection of biographical essays. On April 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut died at the age of 84 after getting head injuries due to falling at his home in New York a few weeks earlier. Buy Books by Kurt Vonnegut

Question: Which American author, born in 1922, wrote the novel "Slaughterhouse Five" in 1969?
Answer: Kurt VONNEGUT