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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city he would later use in his novels as a symbol of American values.

Kurt Sr. was one of the most prominent architects in the city, and his wife, Edith, was the daughter of a wealthy Indianapolis brewer. Kurt Jr. was the youngest of their three children, along with middle child Alice and first-born Bernard.

The fortunes of the family changed dramatically during the Depression when Kurt Sr. saw his architectural business disappear. He had to sell the family home and take young Kurt out of private school, the Orchard School where, in kindergarten, Kurt had met Jane Cox, who eventually became his wife.

This radical change in economic circumstances caused Kurt Sr. virtually to give up on life and Edith to become addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs. Kurt Jr.'s lifelong pessimism clearly had its roots in his parents' despairing response to being blindsided by the Depression.
Teen Years
At Shortridge High, Vonnegut wrote for the student paper, The Echo, and he continued his interest in journalism at Cornell, becoming managing editor of the student paper, The Sun. Vonnegut would be influenced all his writing life by the simple rules of journalism: Get the facts right, compose straightforward declarative sentences, know the audience. Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell but later confessed he was a "lousy student."

When World War II broke out, Vonnegut was 16; at 20, he entered the army and was shipped off to Europe, where he almost immediately was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.
World War II
He was sent as a POW to Dresden. On February 13, 1945, British and American bombers destroyed the city by dropping high explosives followed by incendiary bombs. The resulting firestorm turned the non-militarized city into an inferno that killed up to 60,000 civilians. Vonnegut and his fellow POWs survived by accident only because they were housed some 60 feet underground in a former meat locker and slaughterhouse.

Vonnegut's job for weeks after the bombing was to gather up and burn the remains of the dead. His experience at Dresden marked him for life and eventually resulted in his literary masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five.

Yet another sorrow of the war years was his mother's suicide by drug overdose in 1944.
Marriage, family and novels
After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Cox. They had their first child, Mark.

Vonnegut took an advertising job at General Electric to support his family and began writing short fiction on the side. Kurt and Jane had two more children, Edith and Nanette, and Vonnegut redoubled his efforts to publish his stories.

In 1952, his dystopian apprentice novel Player Piano was published. Vonnegut's beloved sister Alice Adams died of cancer in 1957, just two days after her husband had been killed in a freak commuter train crash. Kurt and Jane took in three of Alice's children, doubling the size of their family overnight. It became more imperative for Vonnegut to bring in more money.

Within 10 years following the arrival of the Adams boys, the short-story market was drying up and Vonnegut turned his attention to novels. He published the whimsical sci-fi epic The Sirens of Titan, the spy novel Mother Night, the fanciful anthropological satire of religion Cat's Cradle, a critique of economic injustice, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and, in 1969, his Dresden novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.

In these books, Vonnegut mastered his trademark black comic voice, making his audience laugh despite the horrors he described. He had already developed a cult following of college students, but he broke through to a mass audience with Slaughterhouse-Five and the excellent film version of the novel that soon followed. By the early 1970s, Vonnegut was one of the most famous living writers on earth.
The 1970s
Yet, the 1970s proved a difficult time for Vonnegut. After his children grew up and left home, his long marriage to Jane fell apart. He moved alone from Cape Cod to New York City, became withdrawn and depressed and suffered from writer's block. His son, Mark, suffered a bipolar disorder breakdown early in the decade, but recovered to write a book about it called The Eden Express.

Not surprisingly, the disintegration of families became a major theme in Vonnegut's two novels in the middle 1970s, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick. While not altogether successful as fiction, these books helped Vonnegut work through the emotional problems that had plagued him since childhood.

In the 1980s, Vonnegut entered a second major phase of his career. His 1979 marriage to photographer Jill Krementz formalized their relationship of several years, and the social realist novels Jailbird, Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard showed a remarkable resurgence of Vonnegut's career after the critical backlash he had suffered in the 1970s.

Galapagos was a brilliant look at Vonnegut's concerns that the "oversized human brain" was ironically leading mankind to possible extinction. Vonnegut also published his third major collection of essays, Palm Sunday.
Fighting For Our Freedoms
Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Vonnegut acted as a powerful spokesman for the preservation of our Constitutional freedoms, for nuclear arms control and for the protection of the earth's fragile biosphere.

As the new century began, Vonnegut continued to try to be, as he said, "a responsible elder in our society," decrying the militarization of our county after the terrorist attacks of 2001.

In his last novel, Timequake, and his last collection of essays, A Man without a Country, Vonnegut powerfully expressed his sense that corporate greed, overpopulation and war would win out in the end over simple humanity. As he ruefully apologized to those who would come after him, "We could have saved the world, but we were just too damned lazy."

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, after a fall on the steps of his New York brownstone. He was mourned the world over as one of the great American writers of the second half of the 20th century.

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Biography - Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city he would later use in his novels as a symbol of American values. Kurt Sr. was one of the most prominent architects in the city, and his wife, Edith, was the daughter of a wealthy Indianapolis brewer.

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Author Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) left an incredible body of work for readers. In his writing career, which spanned more than 50 years, he published 14 novels, three short story collections, and five books of essays, with additional material published after his death. Vonnegut's service during World War II imprinted his life, like it did for many of those who served and who witnessed the trauma of war, destruction, and death.

Several of Vonnegut's works touch on themes of war, but Slaughterhouse-Five is the novel that most closely skirts the line of personal narrative, flirting with memoir, addressing the reader with, "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true." The author makes cameos in his work, just as Hitchcock would, letting you know that he is still there, reminding the reader of his service, almost daring you to call it fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis and then began studying at Cornell University, before entering Army service in January 1943. Through the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), Vonnegut was sent to Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. With a great reduction in the strength of the ASTP due to the rising need for infantry troops, Vonnegut was sent to Camp Atterbury, Indiana (close to home) to train with the 106th Infantry Division.

PFC Kurt Vonnegut, intelligence scout with the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division, arrived with his unit in Le Havre, France in December 1944. They received orders to proceed to St. Vith, just weeks before German artillery turned the Ardennes Forest into a living, deadly fireworks display. In the last two weeks of December 1944, American losses mounted as desperate Germans launched their counteroffensive. As many as 23,000 American were captured as under-supplied and encircled units, many of them uninitiated in combat, were forced to surrender. The 106th Infantry Division reported 6,697 prisoners overall. Vonnegut was captured on December 19, 1944. He wrote of the situation his unit faced in the moments of surrender, "Bayonets aren't much good against tanks."

Although the war was in its final months, Allied victory was still uncertain and Vonnegut and others taken prisoner in this period did not have an easy transition into captivity. According to the principles outlined in the Geneva Convention, POW officers were not required to perform labor for their captors. Vonnegut later wrote to his father, "I am, as you know, a Private." Enlisted troops were often transferred to work detachments in small groups instead of being transferred to larger, organized camps. That winter was one of the coldest on record and conditions worsened for the Germans and for their prisoners as shipping was disrupting and the supply chain broke down, making it more difficult for the life-sustaining Red Cross aid to filter through to Allied POWs.

Another significant danger of POW life, especially for those outside of camps, was posed by Allied air raids. POWs were often transported through German territory via railway car, sometimes marked with red crosses to alert Allied fliers, but railyards and boxcars were often strafed. The train carrying Vonnegut and others to Stalag IV-B was unmarked and was strafed and bombed by the RAF on Christmas Eve. At Stalag IV-B, Vonnegut was one of the unfortunates selected for a 150-man labor detachment destined for Dresden. From January 10th and into February, the American POWs were forced to work extremely long hours in a malt-syrup factory supplied with meager rations and overseen by cruel guards. They were sheltered in a slaughterhouse with the address Schlachthof 5 [Slaughterhouse-Five.] Vonnegut described the seminal event in the history of Dresden in a letter to his family, "On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden-possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me." Vonnegut and the other POWs escaped the firestorm in an underground meat locker. In the aftermath, the POWs were forced to recover bodies and collect corpses for burial or funeral pyres; surviving residents threw rocks and cursed them.

Prior to the Allies reaching Dresden, the POWs were evacuated ahead of liberation, as was often the case with prisoners of war both civilian and military in eastern parts of the German Reich. Vonnegut and the other survivors were eventually liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. RAMP [Recovered American Military Personnel] Vonnegut penned a letter to his father from Camp Lucky Strike in Le Havre. Just six months prior, but in a different world, in December 1944, Vonnegut had arrived in Le Havre with his unit ready to engage in combat with the Germans. In May 1945, thousands of former POWs were assembled there for processing and repatriation. Vonnegut wrote, "I'm told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than 'missing in action.' Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. That leaves me a lot of explaining to do..." Two pages of explaining later he closes,

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano in 1952. Slaughterhouse-Five appeared in 1969, and was a breakthrough success, Vonnegut's first bestseller. The novel was adapted to a film in 1972 and over time has been subjected to many challenges and bans throughout the country, even as recently as 2011. The novel supports so many different types of readings, but squarely within it lies the attempt of an American soldier (and then an American POW) to will himself into another place and time, a place far removed from the moonscape of Dresden, a place where "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

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"I've too damned much to say": Kurt Vonnegut, World War II, and Slaughterhouse-Five | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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From January 1943 - June 1945, writer Kurt Vonnegut served in the US Army. His experiences with the 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge and then later as a POW in Dresden imprinted his life and provided traumatic (and sometimes comedic) material for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five and other works.

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Kurt Vonnegut: the drawings of science fiction's master artist - in pictures

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When he wasn't writing, Kurt Vonnegut doodled. A new book, introduced by his daughter Nanette, brings together some of his finest drawings and his own musings about his art

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,'s crude, ludic doodles-a beaver, a cobra, an asterisk-anus-are famous from novels like "Breakfast of Champions," as is the curly-haired self-portrait that doubled as his signature. But making graphic art was, for Vonnegut, a hobby that extended beyond illustrations for his fiction: he painted seascapes and landscapes on Cape Cod in the nineteen-fifties; felt-tip drawings of abstract faces on discarded pages of manuscripts; and larger, more formal color drawings that he exhibited in a one-man show in Greenwich Village in 1980. Vonnegut described his artwork as a pursuit that liberated him from the oppressive work of writing. In "Fates Worse Than Death," he wrote, "My own means of making a living is essentially clerical, and hence tedious and constipating.... The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza."

A new book, out next month, features a hundred and forty-five of Vonnegut's drawings, selected by his daughter Nanette Vonnegut, a visual artist, who received two shipments of her father's artwork in the mid-nineties, and had kept them in storage until now. Drawn with colorful markers and black pen, and influenced by the Cubists as well as by artists from Joan Miró to Alexander Calder, the pieces-which date mostly from 1985 to 1987-include self-portraits, abstract faces and nudes, geometric still-lifes, and swirling line drawings; many convey the same absurdist humor that characterized Vonnegut's fiction. In the book's introduction, Nanette writes that she comes from a long line of "Master Grand Doodlers"-like her paternal grandfather, the Indianapolis architect Kurt Vonnegut, Sr.-who "fashioned whimsical, original objects of beauty out of thin air." Of her favorite self-portrait of her father (the first image in the slide show above), Nanette writes, "I see hints of blueprints, tile work, leaded-glass windows, William Blake, Paul Klee, Saul Steinberg, Al Hirschfeld, Edward Gorey, my mother's wasp waist, cats and dogs. I see my father, at age four, forty, and eighty-four, doodling his heart out."
All images from "Kurt Vonnegut Drawings" (Monacelli Press), edited by Nanette Vonnegut, out May 13th.

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Slide Show: Kurt Vonnegut's Whimsical Drawings

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Vonnegut described his artwork as a pursuit that liberated him from the oppressive work of writing.

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Why should you read Kurt Vonnegut? [Video]

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Why should you read Kurt Vonnegut? [Video]

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Why should you read Kurt Vonnegut? -  Mia Nacamulli

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Ian McKellen reads Kurt Vonnegut's inspirational letter to some students

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Kurt Vonnegut: Iconic American Writer | Mini Bio | Biography

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Elisa Shoenberger has been building a library since she was 13. She loves writing about all aspects of books from author interviews, antiquarian books, archives, and everything in between. She also writes regularly for Murder & Mayhem and Library Journal. She's also written articles for Huffington Post, Boston Globe, WIRED, Slate, and many other publications. When she's not writing about reading, she's reading and adventuring to find cool new art. She also plays alto saxophone and occasionally stiltwalks. Find out more on her website or follow her on Twitter @vogontroubadour.
View All posts by Elisa Shoenberger
I had a sea change in opinion about the works of Vonnegut. I read Slaughterhouse-5 and Cat's Cradle whilst in high school and despised them both. But then when I started dating my now husband, he convinced me to try God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and then Mother Night. It was shocked how much I liked both books and thus I became a Vonnegut fan. A quotation (below) was part of our wedding ceremony! (I still hate Cat's Cradle but there are some good quotations from it). So here is a list of my favorite 15 Kurt Vonnegut quotes from his novels, short stories, essays, and interviews.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Life, the Universe, and everything

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'" - God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead." - Breakfast of Champions

"In nonsense is strength." - Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes On Perspective

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." - Player Piano

"Science is magic that works." - Cats Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes On Happiness

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" - A Man Without A Country

"That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes." - Deadeye Dick

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Writing/Literature/art

"I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."- Paris Review

On short stories: "And it was itself a form of meditation...reading a short story or in a Buddhist story... That's one form of medicine we don't use anymore." - NPR Interview

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'" - A Man Without A Country

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes On People

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too." - Mother Night

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say." - Cat's Cradle

"'What can any one person do?' he said.

"'Each person does a little something,' I said, 'and there you are.'" - Cat's Cradle

If you want so more Kurt Vonnegut quotes, check out: 10 Rather Wonderful Vonnegut Quotations.

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15 Pithy Kurt Vonnegut Quotes To Get You Through The End Of 2018

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15 pithy Kurt Vonnegut quotes about life, the universe, everything, happiness, art, writing and literature, and people. Read on.

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As affable and loquacious as he was, Kurt Vonnegut disliked interviews. In Palm Sunday, he mentions his distaste for the process itself, of being subjected to an interviewer's desperate attempts at carving open his brain in order to mine it for ideas.

Considering his objections, we are rather lucky that Kurt Vonnegut still went under the interviewer's knife from time to time, for few people have ever had as many interesting things to say as he did. His insights into writing were especially valuable, sage, and practical. Here are 15 funny and wise examples.

1. "I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours."

-To Robert Taylor. Boston Globe Magazine. July 20, 1969.

2. "When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away-even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time."

-To the Paris Review. Spring 1977.

3. "Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business-you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands."

-To Mel Gussow. The New York Times. October 6, 1970.

4. "If you want to make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again."

-To the Paris Review. Spring 1977.

5. "You can't write novels without a touch of paranoia. I'm paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to."

-To Israel Shenker. The New York Times. March 21, 1969.

6. "I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."

-To the Paris Review. Spring 1977.

7. "The reason novels were so thick for so long was that people had so much time to kill. I do not furnish transportation for my characters; I do not move them from one room to another; I do not send them up the stairs; they do not get dressed in the mornings; they do not put the ignition key in the lock, and turn on the engine, and let it warm up and look at all the gauges, and put the car in reverse, and back out, and drive to the filling station, and ask the guy about the weather."

-To Joe David Bellamy and John Casey. From The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers.

8. "My reason for writing is unfortunately in line with Hitler's and Stalin's: I think writers should serve their society."

-To Publishers Weekly. March 22, 1971.

9. "Jokes are efficient things and they must be as carefully constructed as mouse traps. And so for me to write a page of a novel is a very slow business, because the whole thing has to be rigged in order to snap at the end. My books are essentially mosaics, thousands and thousands of tiny little chips all glued together, and each chip is this thing I learned to do-this thing I learned to make as a child-which is a little joke."

-To Frank McLaughlin. Media and Methods. May 1973.

10. "I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers."

-To the Paris Review. Spring 1977.

11. "I suppose that every writer is a gadfly; the crude term that every writer would like to do is mind-f**king. It's to get into somebody else's head. In a Bible-belt area like here it would be a felony to mind-f**k somebody."

-To Hank Nuwer. South Carolina Review. Spring 1987.

12. "Novel writing doesn't breed serenity. It is lying, you know, and the novelist has to spend a lot of time during the course of his writing worrying about whether he is going to get away with his lies. If he fails to, his novel isn't going to work."

-To Charles Reilly. College Literature. 1980.

13. "People need good lies. There are too many bad ones."

-To Wilfred Sheed. LIFE. September 12, 1969.

14. "I like everything there is about being a writer except the way my neighbors treat me. Because I honor them for what they are, and they really do find me irrelevant on Cape Cod. There's my state representative. I campaigned for him, and he got drunk one night and came over and said, 'You know, I can't understand a word you write and neither can any of your neighbors...so why don't you change your style, so why not write something people like?' He was just telling me for my own good. He was a former English major at Brown."

-To Joe David Bellamy and John Casey. From The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers.

15. "Writers get a nice break in one way, at least: They can treat their mental illnesses every day."
Additional Sources: This piece originally ran in 2015 and has been updated for 2021. Do you love reading? Are you eager to know incredibly interesting facts about novelists and their works? Then pick up our new book, The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels and Novelists, out May 25! Allen, William Rodney (Ed.). (1988). Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

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15 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes About Writers and Writing

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Author Kurt Vonnegut hated interviews, but when he did give them, his insights into writing were especially valuable, sage, and practical.