Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84
Kurt Vonnegut, the bestselling satirical novelist known for his works such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle, died Wednesday. He was 84.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them bestsellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of social critic.
Fellow writer Norman Mailer hailed Vonnegut on Thursday as "a marvellous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own … I would salute him our own Mark Twain."
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, another contemporary who, like Vonnegut,was considered scandalous in the 1960s. "Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegutlectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.
He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In Slaughterhouse-Five,released in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War, he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
A movie based on Slaughterhouse-Five was directed by George Roy Hill and released in 1972.
But much inVonnegut's life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success,he battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during the Second World War, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the city.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in Fates Worse Than Death, his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other PoWs inside an underground meat locker labelled slaughterhouse-five.
"He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humour and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut's articles.
After he stopped writing novels in the 1990s, Vonnegut wrote short articles.
Vonnegutwrote his first novel, Player Piano, in 1951, followed by The Sirens of Titan, Canary in a Cat House and Mother Night, making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots. But his novels became cult classics, especially Cat's Cradle in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the Earth.
Some of Vonnegut's books were banned and burned for alleged obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial," he told the Associated Press in 2005.
"It's as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We're just about to run out of petroleum and there's nothing to replace it."