Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied at Cornell before enlisting in the U.S. Army. Captured by German forces in the Battle of the Bulge, he was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden and survived the Allied firebombing of the city in February 1945, sheltered in an underground former slaughterhouse. He later taught at Harvard, City College of New York and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and for many years was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

He published fourteen novels, along with short stories, plays and essays. Vonnegut borrowed from science fiction (time travel, aliens, invented religions) to look at war, technology, money and cruelty. His sentences are short and plain, and his jokes tend to arrive just before the bad news. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), imagines workers pushed aside by machines.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is the book that drew most directly on Dresden, and it was filmed in 1972. Cat's Cradle (1963) and the late essay collection A Man Without a Country (2005) are also widely read. Breakfast of Champions (1973) was his seventh novel. It is set in Midland City, Ohio, where Pontiac dealer Dwayne Hoover slides toward a breakdown while Kilgore Trout, a little-known science fiction writer, travels to an arts festival in town.

If Breakfast of Champions is your way in, you have already met his looser, stranger, more self-aware side. For the book that made his name and the clearest view of the war behind his work, read Slaughterhouse-Five next. For his sharpest satire, try Cat's Cradle.