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KURT Vonnegut, the creator of wry science fiction and
black comedy built on his experience as a World War II prisoner of
war who survived the horrific Dresden bombing, died late Tuesday,
The New York Times reported.
Vonnegut was the author of
Slaughterhouse-Five, widely rated as one of the finest American
novels of the 20th century, Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of
Champions.
He died aged 84 in New York City
after suffering brain injuries in a fall several weeks ago,
according to his longtime friend Morgan Entrekin, the Times reported
on its website Wednesday.
Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in
1922, Vonnegut was captured inside German lines in 1945 following
the Battle of the Bulge.
Confined to an underground
meatpacking cellar in Dresden when Allied bombers descended upon the
city, he was one of just seven US prisoners who survived the
devastating firestorm that engulfed the city.
That experience formed the core
of Slaughterhouse-Five, published in the midst of the furor over the
Vietnam War in 1969 to widespread acclaim.
“All this happened, more or
less,” is the memorable line opening the metaphysical, humanist
tale of a soldier “unstuck in time” in an underground Dresden
abattoir.
After the war he moved to Chicago
where he worked as a local police reporter and entered the
University of Chicago in pursuit of a master’s degree in
anthropology.
His thesis on “The Fluctuations
Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales,” was famously rejected by
all the members of a faculty panel, and he only earned the degree in
1971 when the university accepted Cat’s Cradle as the thesis.
In 1947 he moved to New York and
began writing for magazines and took up odd jobs. He published his
first of 14 novels in 1952. Player Piano was a futuristic study of a
society dominated by machines but with deep divides between upper
and lower classes, painted with the irony and humor that identified
his later novels.
His next book, The Siren of
Titans, came out in 1959, another science fiction novel heavy with
satire and featuring the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.
But his name was made in 1963
with the publishing of Cat’s Cradle. Heavily autobiographical, it
featured a narrator who is an author writing a book about the
dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, called The Day the World
Ended.
The book has ever since become a
standard for literature students in US schools.
He continued to publish short
stories and essays, and then hit the tops of book sales charts in
1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five of which he said:
“All this happened, more or
less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew
really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his.
Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies
killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all
the names.”
He published his last full-length
book, Timequake, in 1997, and wrote in his later years searing and
humorous asides in the Chicago leftist magazine In These Times.
--AFP
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