By the time he died on April 11 at the age of 84, Kurt Vonnegut was lauded more as a cultural icon than for literary accomplishment. At worst, he was disparaged as little more than a very clever gag writer. But Vonnegut matched a unique point of view with a mastery of precise, ironic English prose. “I couldn’t play games with my literary ancestors,” Vonnegut said of his apprenticeship, “since I never studied them systematically.” Instead, he told the Paris Review, he studied chemistry and anthropology in college, while his literary education came haphazardly through his love of books and storytelling. His satirical method owes much to Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger but can be traced back at least as far as Candide — estrangement, the brother from another planet, the man who fell to earth.
The defining event of Vonnegut’s life and of his literature was the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allies on February 13, 1945. A prisoner of war, he survived the bombing in a cement slaughterhouse. When he and his fellow prisoners emerged, “the Florence of the Elbe” — a non-military target in which an estimated 135,000 people died — looked like “the moon . . . nothing but minerals.”
When it was published in 1969, his novel about the raid — and about much else — Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade made Vonnegut rich and famous and a counterculture hero, as well as a hero of the Vietnam anti-war movement. Vonnegut was already in his late 40s. He joked that there was only one person who benefited from the Dresden raid — himself. “I got three dollars for every person killed. Imagine that.” After the war, as an American with a German name, he said he “didn’t want to argue with people who thought Dresden should have been bombed to hell. All I ever said in my book was that Dresden, willy-nilly, was bombed to hell.”
Vonnegut’s clear eye for human hypocrisy and his distinctive hybrid of science fiction, naturalism, and laconic first-person rant made him essential reading to the Vietnam generation, and makes him essential still.
