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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., a successful architect, and Edith Sophia Vonnegut. He had two older siblings, a brother Bernard, and a sister Alice.
Fourth-generation Germans, the Vonnegut children were raised with little, if any, knowledge about their German heritage - a legacy, Kurt believed, of the anti-German feelings vented during World War I. With America\'s entry into the Great War on the side of the Allies, anything associated with Germany became suspect. The anti-German feeling so shamed Kurt\'s
parents, he noted, that they resolved to raise him \"without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the music or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved. They volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism.\" His parents did pass on to their youngest child their love of joke-telling, but, with the world his parents loved
shattered by World War I, Vonnegut also learned, as he put it, \"a bone-deep sadness from them.\"
Part of that unease may have come from the idealism he learned while a public school student - an idealism that is often reflected in his writings. To Vonnegut, America in the 1930s was an idealistic, pacifistic nation. While in the sixth grade, he said he was taught \"to be proud that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing
to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it.\"
Along with instilling Vonnegut with a strong sense of ideals and pacifism, his time in Indianapolis\'s schools started him on the path to a writing career. It was at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, that Vonnegut first began to express his talents, as the editor of the school newspaper.
\"It just turned out,\" Vonnegut noted,
\"that I could write better than a lot of other people. Each person has something he can do easily and can\'t imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it.\" In his case that something was writing.
After graduating in 1940, he entered Cornell University to study biochemistry.
To the young Vonnegut, Cornell itself was a \"boozy dream,\" partly because of the alcohol he imbibed and also because he found himself enrolled in classes for which he had no talent. He did, however, find success outside the classroom by working for the Cornell Daily Sun.
Vonnegut\'s days at the eastern university were interrupted by America\'s entry into World War II. \"I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year,\" he admitted. \"I was delighted to join the army and go to war.\" In January 1943 he volunteered for military service.
He ended up as a battalion intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division.
On Mother\'s Day in 1944 Vonnegut received leave from his duties and returned home to find that his mother had committed suicide the previous evening.
Three months after his mother\'s death, Vonnegut was sent overseas just in time to become engulfed in the last German offensive of the war - the Battle of the Bulge. Captured by the Germans, Vonnegut and other American prisoners were shipped in boxcars to Dresden - \"the first fancy city\" he had ever seen, Vonnegut said. As a POW, he found himself quartered in a slaughterhouse and working in a malt syrup factory. On Feb. 13, 1945, the air raid siren went off in Dresden and Vonnegut, some other POWs and their German guards found refuge in a meat locker located three stories under the slaughterhouse.
They happened to live through the firebombing of Dresden (an incident that killed more people then in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined).
\"It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around,\" Vonnegut said. \"When we came up the city was gone. They burnt the whole damn town down.\"
Freed from his captivity by the Red Army\'s final onslaught against Nazi Germany and returned to America, the soldier - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - tried for many years to put into words what he had experienced during that horrific event. At first, it seemed to be a simple task. \"I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do
would be to report what I had seen,\" Vonnegut noted.
It took him more than twenty years, however, to produce Slaughterhouse-Five wich has retained the reputation as Vonnegut\'s greatest, and most controversial, work. It has been used in classrooms across the country, and also been banned by school boards. In 1973 school officials in Drake, North Dakota, went so far as to confiscate and burn the book, an action Vonnegut termed \"grotesque and ridiculous.\" He was glad, he added, that he had \"the freedom to make soldiers talk the way they do talk.\"
All his books are strongly satirical and ironical (Vonnegut often uses very dark humor), funny, compassionate and extremely wise. They mostly have a very poor plot (or none at all) and the emphasis is put onto the rather comic and pathetic characters. Kurt Vonnegut also very often uses science fiction and comic book formulas (quick action, short dialogues etc.), which usually puts his books onto bookstore shelves marked \"sci-fi\".
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