Vonnegut took an advertising job at General Electric to support his family but began writing short fiction on the side. During this time Kurt and Jane had two more children, Edith and Nanette. 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. Vonnegut published the whimsical sci-fi epic The Sirens of Titan; the spy novel, Mother Night; a 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, he mastered his trademark black comic voice, making his audience laugh despite the horrors he described. Vonnegut 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.
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 He moved alone from Cape Cod to New York City, became withdrawn and depressed and suffered from writer’s block.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. 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. His novel Galapagos was a brilliant look at Vonnegut’s concerns that the “oversized human brain” was ironically leading mankind to possible extinction. At this time Vonnegut also published his third major collection of essays, Palm Sunday. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, 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 this 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 in his last collection of essays, A Man without a Country, Vonnegut powerfully expressed his sense that corporate greed, overpopulation, and war would in the end win out 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.
BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT
Bluebeard
Breakfast of Champions
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Galapagos
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Jailbird
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
1 THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED
2 NICE, NICE, VERY NICE
3 FOLLY
4 A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS
5 LETTER FROM A PRE-MED
6 BUG FIGHTS
7 THE ILLUSTRIOUS HOENIKKERS
8 NEWT’S THING WITH ZINKA
9 VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF VOLCANOES
10 SECRET AGENT X-9
11 PROTEIN
12 END OF THE WORLD DELIGHT
13 THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE
14 WHEN AUTOMOBILES HAD CUT-GLASS VASES
15 MERRY CHRISTMAS
16 BACK TO KINDERGARTEN
17 THE GIRL POOL
18 THE MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY ON EARTH
19 NO MORE MUD
20 ICE-NINE
21 THE MARINES MARCH ON
22 MEMBER OF THE YELLOW PRESS
23 THE LAST BATCH OF BROWNIES
24 WHAT A WAMPETER IS
25 THE MAIN THING ABOUT DR. HOENIKKER
26 WHAT GOD IS
27 MEN FROM MARS
28 MAYONNAISE
29 GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
30 ONLY SLEEPING
31 ANOTHER BREED
32 DYNAMITE MONEY
33 AN UNGRATEFUL MAN
34 VIN-DIT
35 HOBBY SHOP
36 MEOW
37 A MODERN MAJOR GENERAL
38 BARRACUDA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
39 FATA MORGANA
40 HOUSE OF HOPE AND MERCY
41 A KARASS BUILT FOR TWO
42 BICYCLES FOR AFGHANISTAN
43 THE DEMONSTRATOR
44 COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZERS
45 WHY AMERICANS ARE HATED
46 THE BOKONONIST METHOD FOR HANDLING CAESAR
47 DYNAMIC TENSION
48 JUST LIKE SAINT AUGUSTINE
49 A FISH PITCHED UP BY AN ANGRY SEA
50 A NICE MIDGET
51 O.K., MOM
52 NO PAIN
53 THE PRESIDENT OF FABRI-TEK
54 COMMUNISTS, NAZIS, ROYALISTS, PARACHUTISTS, AND DRAFT DODGERS
55 NEVER INDEX YOUR OWN BOOK
57 THE QUEASY DREAM
58 TYRANNY WITH A DIFFERENCE
59 FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS
60 AN UNDERPRIVILEGED NATION
61 WHAT A CORPORAL WAS WORTH
62 WHY HAZEL WASN’T SCARED
63 REVERENT AND FREE
64 PEACE AND PLENTY
65 A GOOD TIME TO COME TO SAN LORENZO
66 THE STRONGEST THING THERE IS
67 HY-U-O-OOK-KUH!
68 HOON-YERA MORA-TOORZ
69 A BIG MOSAIC
70 TUTORED BY BOKONON
71 THE HAPPINESS OF BEING AN AMERICAN
72 THE PISSANT HILTON
73 BLACK DEATH
74 CAT’S CRADLE
75 GIVE MY REGARDS TO ALBERT SCHWEITZER
76 JULIAN CASTLE AGREES WITH NEWT THAT EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS
77 ASPIRIN AND BOKO-MARU
78 RING OF STEEL
79 WHY McCABE’S SOUL GREW COARSE
80 THE WATERFALL STRAINERS
81 A WHITE BRIDE FOR THE SON OF A PULLMAN PORTER
82 ZAH-MAH-KI-BO
83 DR. SCHLICHTER VON KOENIGSWALD APPROACHES THE BREAK-EVEN POINT
84 BLACKOUT
85 A PACK OF FOMA
86 TWO LITTLE JUGS
87 THE CUT OF MY JIB
88 WHY FRANK COULDN’T BE PRESIDENT
89 DUFFLE
90 ONLY ONE CATCH
91 MONA
92 ON THE POET’S CELEBRATION OF HIS FIRST BOKO-MARU
93 HOW I ALMOST LOST MY MOMA
94 THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN
95 I SEE THE HOOK
96 BELL, BOOK, AND CHICKEN IN A HATBOX
97 THE STINKING CHRISTIAN
98 LAST RITES
99 DYOT MEET MAT
100 DOWN THE OUBLIETTE GOES FRANK
101 LIKE MY PREDECESSORS, I OUTLAW BOKONON
102 ENEMIES OF FREEDOM
103 A MEDICAL OPINION
ON THE EFFECTS OF A WRITERS’ STRIKE
104 SULFATHIAZOLE
105 PAIN-KILLER
106 WHAT BOKONONISTS SAY WHEN THEY COMMIT SUICIDE
107 FEAST YOUR EYES!
108 FRANK TELLS US WHAT TO DO
109 FRANK DEFENDS HIMSELF
110 THE FOURTEENTH BOOK
111 TIME OUT
112 NEWT’S MOTHER’S RETICULE
113 HISTORY
114 WHEN I FELT THE BULLET ENTER MY HEART
115 AS IT HAPPENED
116 THE GRAND AH-WHOOM
117 SANCTUARY
118 THE IRON MAIDEN AND THE OUBLIETTE
119 MONA THANKS ME
120 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
121 I AM SLOW TO ANSWER
122 THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON
123 OF MICE AND MEN
124 FRANK’S ANT FARM
125 THE TASMANIANS
126 SOFT PIPES, PLAY ON
127 THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR