Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, writer: born Indianapolis 11 November 1922; married 1945 Jane Cox (deceased; one son, two daughters, three adopted sons; marriage dissolved 1979), 1979 Jill Krementz (one daughter); died New York 11 April 2007.

As a battalion scout with the US 106 Infantry Division, Kurt Vonnegut was captured in December 1944 during the early stages of the Battle of the Bulge. Sent to Dresden, he was imprisoned with other prisoners of war in the cellar of an abattoir labelled "Schlachthöf-funf" - " Slaughterhouse-Five". He was there when, on 13 February 1945, the Allies fire-bombed the city, killing some 135,000 civilians. Vonnegut came out of the cellar next morning, unharmed, to find the city had been totally destroyed. He spent the next few weeks, until the Soviet army marched in, digging bodies out of the rubble. One of his companions was shot for taking a teapot.

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It took him almost 25 years to write about the experience. But when he did, in Slaughterhouse-Five he produced a contemporary American classic, unique for its extraordinary combination of science-fiction, satire, autobiography, outrage and compassion. And "So it goes" - the book's fatalistic shrug of the shoulders in the face of death and suffering - became almost as emblematic for the Vietnam generation as Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" .

Kurt Vonnegut Jnr (he didn't drop the Jnr from his book covers until 1976) was born in 1922 in Indianapolis. His father, Kurt, was an architect and painter; his mother, Edith, a short-story writer. His great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut Snr, had come to America from Germany in 1848. A free-thinker and lover of Voltaire, Clemens had become a brewer in Indianapolis and later fought in the American Civil War.

Kurt junior became the joker of the family in order to be noticed. "My sister, Alice, was five years older, my brother, Bernard, was nine years older and my parents were both talkers," he recalled, "so the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny." He also became fascinated by the humour around him. "I grew up at a time when comedy in this country was superb - it was the Great Depression," he noted.

There were large numbers of absolutely top comedians on radio. And without intending to, I really studied them. I would listen to comedy at least an hour a night all through my youth and got very interested in how jokes worked, and what they were.

His earliest ambition, however, was to be a reporter. He started writing when in 1936 he attended Shortridge High School and contributed to the student newspaper. But his father would only allow him to go to college if he studied something practical. "My father was so hurt by the Depression, unable to make a living as an artist, that he thought I should have nothing to do with the arts."

So in 1940 Kurt Vonnegut Jnr enrolled at Cornell University as a biochemistry major, although he also became a columnist on the student paper. In 1943 he enlisted in the US Army. The following year, his mother, depressed by lack of success with her fiction, committed suicide. She was an alcoholic schizophrenic. "My mother was addicted to being rich," Vonnegut also wrote later, "to servants and unlimited charge accounts . . . so one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression."

When, in May 1945, he was sent home from Germany, Vonnegut was awarded the Purple Heart. Later that year he married Jane Cox, whom he had known since kindergarten, and enrolled in the University of Chicago's MA programme in anthropology. He still wanted to be a reporter and worked for the Chicago City News Bureau. In 1946 the anthropology faculty unanimously rejected his thesis: "On the Fluctuations between Good and Evil in Simple Tales" .

Unable to get a job as a reporter, Vonnegut looked around for something else. His brother Bernard was a research scientist at General Electric. In 1947 Kurt too joined the company, as a "publicity hack", but spent his weekends and evenings writing short stories. In 1950 his story " Report on the Barnhouse Effect" was published in Collier's magazine.

At that time it was a sellers' market for short-story writers. Vonnegut sold two more stories, earning in the process more than he earned in a year at GE. Emboldened by his success and even though he now had two children, in 1951 he quit his job at GE.

He moved the family up to Cape Cod and wrote his first novel, Player Piano, a dystopian satire based on GE. (Most of his books were pessimistic about technology.) It was published in 1952 and reprinted in 1954 as Utopia 14. By then, however, the bottom had begun to fall out of the short-story market. Vonnegut took whatever work he could find over the next few years.

He taught English in a boarding school, wrote ads for an industrial agency in Boston and opened a Saab dealership. In later years, he referred to himself as "a child of the Great Depression, when every job is a miracle ". In other words, for him, writing books was just work. "When my cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV, I didn't think I owed it to the world to go back to writing if I could. Writing was just a job I'd lost."

He did carry on writing, however, and in 1959 published one of his best-known science-fiction books, The Sirens of Titan. By then he had taken on extra family responsibilities. One day in 1958, in the year after his father had died, his brother-in-law was killed in a train crash and the next his sister, Alice, died of cancer. Vonnegut adopted his sister's children.

In 1962 he followed Sirens of Titan with Mother Night, an intriguing story about an American who becomes a notorious Nazi propagandist whilst acting as a double agent for his country. (It was superbly filmed in 1996 with Nick Nolte in the lead part.) Neither book was reviewed and Vonnegut was paid for each no more than he would have got in the old days for a single short story.

Critics began to take notice the following year with the publication of Cat's Cradle. Ostensibly science fiction, it was more a satire on science and religion. The Sunday Telegraph declared that "not for the first time, but more resoundingly than for many years, science fiction has produced . . . a major novelist and a major novel".

Vonnegut disliked the science-fiction tag. Rather disingenuously, he said later:

Someone decreed that I was a science-fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology and most American fine writers know nothing about technology. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, New York, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.

His next book, the satirical God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1964), was the first to be widely reviewed. Critical success didn't assuage a feeling of failure, however. He said many times that he was a failure until he was 47, in 1969 - the year that Slaughterhouse-Five was published. However, momentum had begun to build before then. In 1967 he was offered a job in the prestigious University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and got a three-book deal with the Delacorte Press. (They kicked off in 1968 with a collection of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House.) He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing him time in Dresden to research what was to become Slaughterhouse-Five.

He had been working on a book about the fire-bombing of Dresden for years. As he says at the start of Slaughterhouse-Five:

When I got home from the Second World War . . . I thought it would be easy to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big. But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then - not enough of them to make a book, anyway.

When Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 it was an immediate success, topping the New York Times best-seller list and catapulting Vonnegut to national prominence. The following year he was appointed to teach creative writing at Harvard. The book made him a cult figure on university campuses. He was quick to point out that he was the only person to profit from the Dresden raid - to the tune of several dollars per person killed that night. His odd gratitude for the "opportunity" the Second World War gave him was echoed by the case of his friend Joseph Heller, of whom Vonnegut said: "Joseph Heller would have been in the dry-cleaning business now, if not for WWII."

Vonnegut followed his bestseller with a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, then, in 1973, another novel, Breakfast of Champions (also filmed, with Bruce Willis, in 1999). The novel was an instant best-seller but disappointed most critics. Indeed, whilst over the next two decades Vonnegut was showered with honours, awards and honorary degrees and continued to produce novels, short-story collections and non-fiction works, he never equalled the critical success of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Slapstick or Lonesome No More (1976) got hostile reviews, Jailbird (1979) lukewarm ones. Bluebeard (1987) was ignored by many major publications. However, there was much to cope with in Vonnegut's private life. In 1972 his son Mark suffered an emotional collapse. He, like Vonnegut's mother, was schizophrenic, and wrote an account of his illness in Eden Express (1975). Vonnegut and his wife Jane divorced in 1979, and Jill Krementz became his second wife in the same year.

In 1985, when he was 61, Vonnegut attempted suicide with a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol - he was found before they kicked in, and was taken to hospital. He said years later, enigmatically, that it was because his life at that point was "undignified".

He continued to produce both fiction and non-fiction. In 1997, when he was 74, he published Timequake, a novel he declared would be his last. A collection of early short stories, Bagombo Snuff Box, followed in 1999. His central preoccupation remained the same in that as in his other novels - "ordinary people behaving decently in an indecent society".

Timequake featured his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout, in "gaily mournful" mode. Trout, an obscure science-fiction writer usually published in pornographic magazines, either appeared in or was mentioned in most of Vonnegut's books. Indeed, in a minor piece of literary trickery, the fictional Trout once authored a real book, Venus on the Half-Shell, although it was later revealed that the novel was actually written by Philip Jose Farmer.

Vonnegut had a bestseller in 2005 with a collection of his non-fiction work, A Man Without a Country. That included potshots at the Bush administration and comments on the future - such as he felt it was - of the planet. The fact it was a success, he said, was "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life".

Vonnegut found writing lonely, hard work. "The reason I have written so little is that it's so damn hard to make jokes work," he explained.

You can't really misfire with a tragic scene. It's bound to be moving if the right elements are all present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

He also understood that humour is subjective - and people just don't always get the joke.

He was friends with a number of well-known writers, many of whom predeceased him - Nelson Algren, Truman Capote, James Jones, Joseph Heller. In 1997 he said: "Almost all the people I know are dead. My great war buddies are all gone. My publisher's dead. There are not many people I want to talk to anymore." Although he enjoyed "farting about" as one of life's great pleasures, he could also be pessimistic. "The big challenge of life is fighting the boredom of it all," he said.

Peter Guttridge