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Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

NEW YORK - In books such as “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Hocus Pocus,” Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound.

Vonnegut, regarded by many critics as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died Wednesday at 84. He had suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

In a statement, Norman Mailer hailed Vonnegut as “a marvelous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own. ... I would salute him — our own Mark Twain.”

“He was sort of like nobody else,” said another fellow author, Gore Vidal. “Kurt was never dull.”

Vonnegut’s works — more than a dozen novels plus short stories, essays and plays — contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim (“Slaughterhouse-Five”) and Eliot Rosewater (“God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”) as transparent vehicles for his points of view.

Vonnegut lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

“He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important,” said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.

Like “Catch-22,” by Vonnegut’s friend Joseph Heller, “Slaughterhouse-Five” was a World War II novel embraced by opponents of the Vietnam War, linking a so-called “good war” to the unpopular conflict of the 1960s and ’70s.

Victim of, advocate against censorship
Some of Vonnegut’s books were banned and burned for alleged obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers’ aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.

Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

“I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial,” he told The Associated Press in 2005. “It’s as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We’re just about to run out of petroleum and there’s nothing to replace it.”

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the German city.

“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” Vonnegut wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death,” his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

An iconoclast
The novel that emerged, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

After World War II, he reported for Chicago’s City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, “Player Piano,” in 1951, followed by “The Sirens of Titan,” “Canary in a Cat House” and “Mother Night,” making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially “Cat’s Cradle” in 1963, in which scientists create “ice-nine,” a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the Earth.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with “A Man Without a Country,” a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration (“upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography”) and the uncertain future of the planet.

He called the book’s success “a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.”

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister’s three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he’d prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,” Vonnegut told the AP.

“My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I’ll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children.”


Kurt Vonnegut works
— “Player Piano,” 1951
— “The Sirens of Titan,” 1959
— “Canary in a Cat House,” 1961 (short works)
— “Mother Night,” 1961
— “Cat’s Cradle,” 1963
— “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” 1965
— “Welcome to the Monkey House,” 1968 (short works)
— “Slaughterhouse-Five,” 1969
— “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” 1971 (play)
— “Between Time and Timbuktu,” 1972 (TV script)
— “Breakfast of Champions,” 1973
— “Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons,” 1974 (opinions)
— “Slapstick,” 1976
— “Jailbird,” 1979
— “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage,” 1981 (essays)
— “Deadeye Dick,” 1982
— “Galapagos,” 1985
— “Bluebeard,” 1987
— “Hocus Pocus,” 1990
— “Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s,” 1991 (essays)
— “Timequake,” 1997

Vonnegut's Apocalypse
He survived being captured by the Nazis and the suicide of his mother to write some of the funniest, darkest novels of our time, but it took George W. Bush to break him
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
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"I'm Jeremiah, and I'm not talking about God being mad at us," novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the parlor windows of his Manhattan brownstone. "I'm talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. We've become far too dependent on hydrocarbons, and it's going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course, the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry."

For the most part, this sort of apocalyptic attitude is to be expected from Vonnegut, who, after all, in his futuristic novel Cat's Cradle (1963) created Ice-Nine, a substance with the capacity to obliterate the Earth incrementally, like the "great door of heaven being closed softly." The naive protagonist of the novel -- a character named John/Jonah -- actually struggles to write a book titled The Day the World Ended. (Cat's Cradle also includes a hilarious faux religion known as Bokononism, whose religious texts carry the warning "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.") In the interview collection Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut, he even dismisses the notion that his fourteen novels, six essay collections and dozens of short stories have a long shelf life, saying, "Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by." Add to that doomsday scenario Vonnegut's notorious bouts of chronic depression, daily doldrums and suicidal longings, and you get a literary Cassandra of the first order.

Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. "I know what it's all about," he scoffed. "I don't need any more persuasion." Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. "There is nothing they can do," he bleakly answered. "It's over, my friend. The game is lost."

In the annals of American literature, Vonnegut has been categorized as a black-humorist -- a post-Hiroshima novelist who encouraged readers to laugh at the ghastly absurdity of the modern condition. More than any other fiction writer, Vonnegut has been unafraid to peer into the apocalyptic abyss of our lives. This is likely why, after five and a half years of the Bush administration, Vonnegut's signature bleak wit seems more relevant than ever. His most recent book, A Man Without a Country, a collection of essays, was a surprise best seller last year, spending more than eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and selling more than 250,000 copies. It would be simple enough to say that Vonnegut is having a major late-career resurgence, except for the fact that he never really went away. Vonnegut is that rare literary figure who never stopped being cool. Ever since he rose to prominence during the 1960s, Vonnegut -- with his Twainian mop of curly hair, bushy Bavarian beer-hall mustache and carbolic-acid smirk -- has been dubbed a prose shaman with a trick bag full of preposterous characters. Harper's deemed him an "unimitative and inimitable social satirist," and The New York Times anointed him the "laughing prophet of doom."

On this day, though, as Vonnegut sips coffee and his klix white dog, Flour, yaps in the background, there is no wry amusement or social satire in his repertoire. There is only burning dissent about the way modern technology and global capitalism are usurping the last gasps of goodness from honest laborers' lives. And deep sadness that everyday humans are butchering their most civilized impulses. But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. "Oh, yes," he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?" "Lung cancer?" I offer.

"No. No. Because I'm eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn't work. Now I'm forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, 'Colon.'"....