I couldn't do a steady diet of Kurt Vonnegut, but I always had a love of his arch sensibilities. We also shared a birthday, something that every newspaper horoscope column would tell me every year on my birthday. Sort of makes you feel like you're buddies or something, you know?
My favorite Vonnegut story is Player Piano. What's yours?
Here are some other obits:
Link: Kurt Vonnegut | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited.
Link: Democracy Now! | Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84.
US writer Vonnegut dies from injuries sustained in fall
Thursday, April 12, 2007
The US writer and novelist Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84 from injuries he suffered in a fall at his Manhattan home a number of weeks ago.
Vonnegut was the author of 19 published novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays.
He was regarded as one of the United States' most articulate and imaginative social critics, using satirical commentary to get his message across.
Vonnegut is best known for his novels Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle.
Link: NPR : Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor.
RemembrancesNovelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor
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Thos RobinsonKurt Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, attending the opening night of What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole at Biltmore Theatre on Feb. 2, 2006 in New York City. Getty Images
NPR Interviews with Vonnegut
Morning Edition, April 12, 2007 · Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, essays and plays, died in Manhattan Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut leaves behind many novels, including that iconic novel born out of his memories of war and its absurdities. Vonnegut's mother killed herself when he was a young man leaving to serve in World War II. As a private in that war, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden. From there he stepped out into the hellish, surreal landscape that Dresden became after it was firebombed. It took him 25 years to turn that experience into Slaughterhouse-Five.
"You can't remember pure nonsense," Vonnegut told Renee Montagne in 2003. "It was pure nonsense, the pointless destruction of that city, and, well, I just couldn't get it right. … I kept writing crap, as they say."
Slaughterhouse-Five, filled with the blackest of black humor, was finally published in 1969 — and became an instant bestseller. Vonnegut said he saw the book's publication as a kind of liberation.
"I think it had not only freed me, I think it freed writers," he said, "because the Vietnam War made our leadership and our motives so scruffy and essentially stupid that we could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis, and what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff."
Vonnegut was a committed humanist and an outraged critic of the war in Iraq. On the lecture circuit in the years before his death, he told students that teaching is friendship, and he told artists that their anti-war protests had the power of a banana cream pie. Vonnegut also asked people to notice when they feel happy.
Fellow author Gore Vidal says Vonnegut was a writer like no one else. "He was a witty writer. He was a very good science fiction writer, which meant that he could deal rather safely in satire at the times in the '50s when other people didn't really dare."
Indeed Vonnegut approached the darkest subjects with humor, which was also the way he described his own life. He was a longtime smoker who once explained the habit by calling it a "fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide." In Vonnegut's case, it never quite took: He lived into his ninth decade, and died from complications from a fall.
Vonnegut's last work was a collection of essays called A Man Without a Country. In it, he suggested the way that music helped him through tragic times.
"Why this is so I don't know," he explained in a 2005 interview. "Or what music is I don't know. But it helps me so. During the Great Depression in Indianapolis when I was in high school I would go to jazz joints and listen to black guys playing, and man they could really do it. And I was really teared up. Still the case now."
Though he was a vocal religious skeptic, Vonnegut wrote in that final essay collection that "if I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'"
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