Kurt vonnegut biography facts on samuel
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Vonnegut’s Life
–Adapted from Critical Companion to Kurt Vonnegut: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work by Susan Farrell. ((New York: Facts on File Press, 2008).
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922, the third child of Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith Lieber Vonnegut. Both Vonnegut’s father, Kurt Sr., and his grandfather, Bernard Vonnegut, were local architects in Indianapolis. While the family was comfortably well-to-do during Vonnegut’s earliest childhood, they suffered financial setbacks during the depression years. As a result, Vonnegut attended public schools even though his older siblings had received private school educations. But Vonnegut thrived at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, where he played clarinet in the school band and served as a writer and editor for the school’s daily newspaper.
After graduating from high school in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York,
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The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose birth centenary we celebrate in November, was many things during his 84 years on earth: war veteran, trained mechanical engineer, brott reporter, corporate publicist, used fordon salesman. But perhaps his greatest contribution to humanity, and the quality that runs as the throughline of his public career, was the way he relentlessly mocked the presumptions of the ruling elite.
The absolute refusal to accept handed-down truths—whether in politics, science, religion or art—remains the constant in Vonnegut’s life and work. He was not the sort of man who believed that anyone should impose his or her concept of the guardrails defining the limits of acceptable behavior on anyone else.
Here is Vonnegut from his debut novel, 1952’s Player Piano:
The sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it’s the people’s to take back if they so wish. The machines…have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to th
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Kurt Vonnegut: A Biography
Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)
Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer who published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction. He is most famous for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) which has become an American classic.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical novel based on his experience as a prisoner of war who survived the allies’ bombing of Dresden. Darkly satirical, it is Vonnegut’s most influential novel and that novel alone warrants its author’s place among the great American fiction writers. It has been adapted for film, television, stage and radio.
A mark of Slaughterhouse-Five’s innovatory power is that it has been subject to several censorship exercises and there have been numerous attempts to ban it. Its irreverent tone, perceived obscene content and perceived heresy, American soldiers’ use of profanity, and its depiction of sex and homosexuality have offended the edu