Novelist
Kurt Vonnegut dies at age 84
Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the
absurdity of war and
questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works
such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died
Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long
despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain
injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said
his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers,
as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays,
Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. Indianapolis,
his hometown, declared 2007 as "The Year of Vonnegut" - an
announcement he said left him "thunderstruck."
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for
themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the
institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible
situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and
unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once
told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking
humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim
and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points
of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary
and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the
plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the
epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression
throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with
pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the
job.
"I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor
and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of
looking at the big picture of the things that were most
important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a
liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut
articles.
His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany
during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner
during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden
when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an
estimated tens of thousands of people.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing
about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut
wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of
sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal,
which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an
underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.
The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden
by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was
published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified
his reputation as an iconoclast.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who
noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the
last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in
for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general
style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made
it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a
bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a
"fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic
Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell University
before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News
Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a
job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in
1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat
House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs
on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his
deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as
haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became
cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which
scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water
solid and destroys the earth.
Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned
and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on
censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group
and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American
Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom,
rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its
honorary president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little
control over their fate. Vonnegut said the villains in his
books were never individuals, but culture, society and
history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too
damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap," he once
suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a
message for flying-saucer creatures.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but
continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in
2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his
nonfiction work, including jabs at the Bush administration
("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography")
and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at
the end of a life."
In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and
columnist at In These Times. Bleifuss said he had been
trying to get Vonnegut to write something more for the
magazine, but was unsuccessful.
"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more
to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his
life," Bleifuss said.
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New
York, adopted his sister's three young children after she
died. He also had three children of his own with his first
wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his
second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer
to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount
Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old
age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of
his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told
The Associated Press in 2005.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very
unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing
suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad
example for my children."
