Person

Vonnegut, Kurt, 1922-2007

1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

He was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works, with further collections published posthumously. He attended Cornell University but withdrew in 1943 to enlist in the US Army. He was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse. After the war, he enrolled in the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill as an anthropology student, and he worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago at night. Vonnegut published his first novel “Player Piano” in 1952, followed by several other novels and short story collections in the 1950s and 60s. His breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969). In 1970, he was also a correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. Later in his career, he published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections, such as “Fates Worse Than Death” (1991) and “A Man Without a Country” (2005). He was presented a Bronze Medallion from Guild Hall in 1986 and named New York's State Author by the New York State Writers' Institute in 2001. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Vonnegut posthumously in 2015. The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut and a crater on the planet Mercury are named in his honour. The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis was designated a Literary Landmark by the Literary Landmarks Association in 2021.

In 1945, he married Jane Marie Cox (1922–1986), divorced in 1971, and, in 1979, he remarried Jill Krementz. He died on April 11, 2007, in New York City, New York.