Kurt Vonnegut was born to fourth-generation German-American parents, son and grandson of architects in the Indianapolis firm Vonnegut & Bohn. As a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis,[3] Vonnegut worked on the nation's first daily high school newspaper, The Daily Echo. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1942, where he served as assistant managing editor and associate editor for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, and majored in biochemistry. While attending Cornell, he was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, following in the footsteps of his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The army sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.[2] On May 14, 1944, Mothers' Day, his mother, Edith Lieber Vonnegut, committed suicide.[4][edit] World War II and the firebombing of Dresden
Photo of Dresden shortly after the bombingKurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a Corporal with the 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion and wandered alone behind enemy lines for several days until captured by Wehrmacht troops on December 14, 1944.[5] Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut witnessed the February 13–February 14, 1945 bombing of Dresden, which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of just seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive, in their cell in an underground meat locker of a plant known as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). "Utter destruction", he recalled, "carnage unfathomable." The Germans put him to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."[6] This experience formed the core of one of his most famous works, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a theme in at least six other books.[6]Vonnegut was freed by Red Army troops in May 1945. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound."[7][edit] Post-war career
After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.[8]On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine[9] and the Modern Library.[10]Early in his adult life, he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod.[11][edit] Personal life
The author was known as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. until his father's death in October, 1957; after that he was known simply as Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt was also the younger brother of Bernard Vonnegut, an atmospheric scientist who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificial stimulation of rain.He married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, after returning from World War II, but the couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz.[2] Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.He had seven children: he shared three with his first wife, adopted his sister Alice's three children when she died of cancer, and adopted another child, Lily. Two of these children have published books, including his only biological son, Mark Vonnegut, who wrote The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery; the tendency to insanity he acknowledged may be partly hereditary, influencing him to take up the study of medicine and orthomolecular psychiatry. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint, and to whom Kurt Vonnegut bore some resemblance in both literary style and physical appearance.[12]His daughter Edith Vonnegut ("Edie"), an artist, has also had her work published in a book entitled Domestic Goddesses. Edith was once married to Geraldo Rivera. She was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. His youngest daughter is Nanette ("Nanny"), named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior, and is the subject of several of his paintings, notably "Nanny and Rose".Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father was killed when his commuter train went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey, and their mother — Kurt's sister Alice — died of cancer. In Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself. Her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News, a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress.On November 11, 1999, the asteroid 25399 Vonnegut was named in Vonnegut's honor.[13]On January 31, 2000, a fire destroyed the top story of his home. Vonnegut suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized in critical condition for four days. He survived, but his personal archives were destroyed. After leaving the hospital, he recuperated in Northampton, Massachusetts.
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