Champion of satire
Peter Guttridge

Kurt Vonnegut, whose novel Slaughterhouse-Five was inspired by experiences in wartime Dresden remained a social critic to the last

As a battalion scout with the US 106 Infantry Division, Kurt Vonnegut was captured in December 1944 during the early stages of the Battle of the Bulge. Sent to Dresden, he was imprisoned with other prisoners of war in the cellar of an abattoir labelled Schlachth f-funf - "Slaughterhouse-Five". He was there when, on February 13, 1945, the Allies fire-bombed the city, killing some 135,000 civilians. Vonnegut came out of the cellar next morning, unharmed, to find the city had been totally destroyed. It took him almost 25 years to write about the experience. But when he did, in Slaughterhouse-Five he produced a contemporary American classic, unique for its extraordinary combination of science-fiction, satire, autobiography, outrage and compassion. And "So it goes"—the book’s fatalistic shrug of the shoulders in the face of death and suffering— became almost as emblematic for the Vietnam generation as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Kurt Vonnegut Jnr (he didn’t drop the Jnr from his book covers until 1976) was born in 1922 in Indianapolis. His father, Kurt, was an architect and painter; his mother, Edith, a short-story writer. He also became fascinated by the humour around him. "I grew up at a time when comedy in this country was superb—it was the Great Depression," he noted.

His earliest ambition, however, was to be a reporter. But his father would only allow him to go to college if he studied something practical. In 1943, he enlisted in the US Army. In 1947 Kurt too joined the company, as a "publicity hack", but spent his weekends and evenings writing short stories. In 1950 his story Report on the Barnhouse Effect was published in Collier’s magazine. He moved the family up to Cape Cod and wrote his first novel, Player Piano, a dystopian satire based on GEC. (Most of his books were pessimistic about technology.) It was published in 1952 and reprinted in 1954 as Utopia 14. In later years, he referred to himself as "a child of the Great Depression, when every job is a miracle." For him, writing books was just work. "When my cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV, I didn’t think I owed it to the world to go back to writing if I could. Writing was just a job I’d lost."

In 1959, he published one of his best-known science-fiction books, The Sirens of Titan. In 1962 he followed Sirens of Titan with Mother Night, an intriguing story about an American who becomes a notorious Nazi propagandist whilst acting as a double agent for his country. (It was superbly filmed in 1996 with Nick Nolte in the lead part.) Critics began to take notice the following year with the publication of Cat’s Cradle. Ostensibly science fiction, it was more a satire on science and religion. His next book, the satirical God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1964), was the first to be widely reviewed. Critical success didn’t assuage a feeling of failure, however. He said many times that he was a failure until he was 47, in 1969—the year that Slaughterhouse-Five was published. A Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him time in Dresden to research what was to become Slaughterhouse-Five.

The book , an immediate success, topped the New York Times bestseller list and catapulted Vonnegut to national prominence. The following year he was appointed to teach creative writing at Harvard. The book made him a cult figure on university campuses. Vonnegut followed his bestseller with a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, then, in 1973, another novel, Breakfast of Champions (also filmed, with Bruce Willis, in 1999). The novel was an instant bestseller but disappointed most critics. Indeed, whilst over the next two decades Vonnegut was showered with honours, awards and honorary degrees and continued to produce novels, short-story collections and non-fiction works, he never equalled the critical success of Slaughterhouse-Five. In 1985, when he was 61, Vonnegut attempted suicide with a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol - he was found before they kicked in, and was taken to hospital. He said years later, enigmatically, that it was because his life at that point was "undignified".

He continued to produce both fiction and non-fiction. In 1997, when he was 74, he published Timequake, a novel he declared would be his last. His central preoccupation remained the same in that as in his other novels - "ordinary people behaving decently in an indecent society".

Vonnegut had a bestseller in 2005 with a collection of his non-fiction work, A Man Without a Country. That included potshots at the Bush administration and comments on the future —such as he felt it was— of the planet. The fact it was a success, he said, was "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life". Vonnegut found writing lonely, hard work. "The reason I have written so little is that it’s so damn hard to make jokes work," he explained. He was friends with a number of well-known writers, many of whom predeceased him. "The big challenge of life is fighting the boredom of it all," he said.

— By arrangement with The Independent

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