Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose blend of science fiction, dark humor, and humanist satire made him one of the most distinctive American voices of the second half of the twentieth century. He was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr., an architect, and Edith Lieber, both descended from prosperous German-American families ruined by the Great Depression and anti-German sentiment of the World Wars.

He studied biochemistry at Cornell University but left in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. As an infantry scout he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, where he survived the Allied firebombing of February 1945 by sheltering in an underground meat locker. After the war he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked in public relations for General Electric.

His early novels Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959) were marketed as science fiction, but Cat's Cradle (1963) and especially Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), drawn from his Dresden experience and structured around the time-unstuck Billy Pilgrim, brought him a wide literary readership and frequent appearances on banned-book lists.

He continued with Breakfast of Champions (1973), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), and the essay collections Palm Sunday (1981) and A Man Without a Country (2005), while also drawing cartoons. He died on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, New York City, of brain injuries from a fall, aged 84.

The name Kurt is a German masculine given name, a short form of Konrad meaning "bold counsel," which fit his sardonic, plain-spoken voice.