The Genius of Kurt Vonnegut

“The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.

Early Years

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father Kurt Sr. was a successful architect in the city, and his wife, Edith, was the daughter of a wealthy Indianapolis brewer. The youngest of their three children, Kurt Jr had an older brother and sister.

However the fortunes of the family changed dramatically during the Great Depression when his father, Kurt Sr, saw his business go bust. He had to sell the family home and take young Kurt out of private school, where he met Jane Cox, who would eventually became his wife.

This downturn in fortune caused Kurt Sr. mental health issue and Edith to succumbed to addiction problems.

At both school and University, Vonnegut developed an interest in journalism and he wrote for the student paper. 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 University without much success.

World War II

When World War II broke out in 1939 , Vonnegut was 16 years old and four years later he joined the army. He was posted to Europe, where he was soon captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.

As a prisoner of war, he was transported to Dresden, where within a month, British and American bombers decimated the city, igniting a firestorm that turned the city into an inferno, killing as many as 60,000 civilians. The fact that Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were housed some 60 feet underground in a former meat locker and slaughterhouse was the only reason they managed to survive.

It was Vonnegut’s task to gather and burn the victims’ corpses for several weeks following the blast. His time at Dresden left a lasting impression on him, and Slaughterhouse-Five, his literary masterwork, came to be.

Post War and Early Success

Vonnegut wed Jane Cox, his boyhood sweetheart, after the war. Mark was their first child together. To help support his family, Vonnegut started working in advertising. He also started creating short stories on the side. Following the birth of his next two children, Edith and Nanette, Vonnegut concentrated more on establishing himself as an author.

His dystopian apprentice book Player Piano was released in 1952. Just two days after her husband was murdered in an unexpected commuter train accident, Alice Adams, Vonnegut’s cherished sister, passed away from cancer in 1957. Kurt and Jane expanded their family overnight by taking in three of Alice’s kids. It became more important than ever for Vonnegut to increase his income.

Vonnegut moved his focus to novels. He wrote the spy thriller Mother Night, the religious satire Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and his Dresden novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969.

Throughout these works, Vonnegut perfected his distinctive dark comedy delivery and managed to make his readers laugh despite the horrific events he portrayed. He already had a cult following among college students, but Slaughterhouse-Five and the film adaptation that followed it marked his breakthrough to the wider populace.

Later Times

But for Vonnegut, the 1970s proved to be a challenging decade. His lengthy marriage to Jane ended when his now adult children left home. He went by himself from Cape Cod to New York City, lost his social life and fell into depression.

Unsurprisingly, in the middle of the 1970s, Vonnegut’s two books Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick were heavily influenced by the breakdown of families. These books, while not entirely successful as fiction, assisted Vonnegut in resolving emotional issues that had troubled him since he was a young child.

Vonnegut began a second significant stage of his career in the 1980s. The social realist books Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, and Bluebeard demonstrated a stunning recovery of Vonnegut’s career after the critical backlash he had faced in the 1970s. His 1979 marriage to photographer Jill Krementz confirmed their long-standing relationship.

On April 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut passed away from a fall outside of his New York residence. He was remembered as one of the greatest American writers of the second half of the 20th century and in our humble opinion, a genius.

5 Best Kurt Vonnegut Novels

The Sirens of Titan

When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour.

But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan – one of Saturn’s moons – is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft ..

Breakfast of Champions

A satire of America, a satire of humanity itself, Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

Cat’s Cradle

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation…

Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five is an account of Billy Pilgrim’s capture and incarceration by the Germans during the last years of World War II, and scattered throughout the narrative are episodes from Billy’s life both before and after the war, and from his travels to the planet Tralfamadore. Billy is able to move both forwards and backwards through his lifetime in an arbitrary cycle of events. Enduring the tedious life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a former pornographic movie star on the planet Tralfamadore and simultaneously an American prisoner of war (POW) in Nazi Germany.

Mother Night

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

Some suggested further reading on Kurt Vonnegut…

A review of his biography As So It Goes by Charles Shields

And a more complete review of Kurt Vonnegut Best Books

You can also give our Science Fiction Quiz a try