Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, essays and plays, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 84.
Vonnegut's most famous work was an 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 the ancient German city of Dresden. From there, he stepped out into the hellish, surreal landscape that Dresden became after it was firebombed.
"As prisoners of war... we dealt hands-on with dead Germans, digging them out of basements 'cause they'd suffocated there, and taking them to a huge funeral pyre," he told NPR in 2003. "And I heard — I didn't see it done — they finally gave up this procedure because it was too slow. And of course the city was starting to smell pretty bad. They sent in guys with flamethrowers."
It took him 25 years to turn that experience into Slaughterhouse-Five.
"You can't remember pure nonsense," Vonnegut said. "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 best-seller. 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 delivered gentle and gnomic lessons: He told students that teaching is friendship, and told artists that their antiwar protests had the power of a banana cream pie. Vonnegut also asked people to notice when they feel happy.
In 1999, Vonnegut told NPR that he wrote everything for one specific reader: his sister Allie, who died of cancer in her 30s.
"It's just trusting the taste of someone else," he said. "I mean, it could easily be a teacher... but that is the secret of artistic unity, I think, even when painting a picture or composing music, is to do it with one person in mind. I don't think you can open a window and make love to the whole world."
John Irving, best known for his novel The World According to Garp, studied creative writing under Vonnegut.
"The only critical thing he ever said to me... was about my fondness for semicolons, which Kurt himself despised," Irving remembered. "He called them hermaphrodites."
Vonnegut scholar Jerome Klinkowitz said the author's work is filled with inept, foolish characters, but that cheap shots were not his style.
"He did plenty of outrageous works," Klinkowitz said. "But he never wanted his work to be hurtful. There's no villains in any of his novels."
Another fellow author, Gore Vidal, agreed: "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 of complications from a fall.
Vonnegut's last work was a collection of essays called A Man Without a Country. In it, he suggested that music helped him through tragic times.
"Why this is so, I don't know," he said in a 2005 NPR 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.'"
Vonnegut's other novels include Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night and The Sirens of Titan. The author, 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, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.
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