Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Background

InfoJake Kolb, Joe Chawaga, Scott Wagner, Alex Girone

General Information

Born

November 11, 1922

Indianapolis, Indiana

Son of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and Edith Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Sr. was a wealthy architect in Indianapolis

Edith Vonnegut was the daughter of a wealthy Indianapolis brewer

When Kurt Jr. was 6 the Stock Market crashed, sending the US into the Great Depression

Kurt Sr.’s architecture firm saw virtually no business, and with the closure of Edith’s father’s brewing company because of the prohibition of 1921, the wealth of the Vonnegut’s disappeared

This almost overnight change in social status caused Kurt Sr. to give up on life and led to Edith’s addiction to prescription drugs, and alcohol

Kurt Jr.’s pessimism later in life clearly was because of his parents

(A Brief Biography of Kurt Vonnegut)

General Info Continued

Teen years

Vonnegut showed interest in writing even in high school where he worked for the student newspaper

Cornell

Studied Chemistry

Continued to show interest in writing by becoming managing editor of the student paper

WWII

Dropped out of Cornell at age 20

Joined Army

Almost Immediately Captured by Germans at The Battle of The Bulge and sent to Dresden as a POW

(Kurt Vonnegut Biography)

Experience as a POW

-Kurt was an advance scout with the 106th Infantry Division but was captured by Germans after traveling behind German lines for a few days.

-He was put in an underground meat storage locker in Dresden, Germany and survived an American and British firebombing that destroyed the entire city

-After the bombing, Kurt was put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters which included carrying women, children, and old men

-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.(Kurt Vonnegut)

Experience as a POW

As Vonnegut gets home he reflects on what he saw during his time in Germany.

He recalls removing corpses from houses after the bombings.

"When we went into them, a typical shelter … looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had

heart failure. Just people sitting in chairs, all dead. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open

areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to

keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt."

(Kurt Vonnegut)

Life at Home

After being freed from captivity Vonnegut went on to marry Jane Marie Cox on September 1st 1945

The young couple moved to Chicago where Vonnegut got his masters degree in anthropology from the university of Chicago.

Vonnegut went on to get a job with General Electric as a research laboratory publicist.

(Kurt Vonnegut)

Life at Home

While working for GE, Vonnegut started to write stories for mass market magazines.

In 1951 Vonnegut quit his job at GE and moved to Cape Cod to become a fulltime writer.

He published many successful short stories and novels.

(Kurt Vonnegut)

Influence for SH5

- In 1967, Vonnegut returned to Dresden with his fellow POW Bernard O’Hare to gather material for the book.

-Three years earlier, Vonnegut had visited O’Hare at his Pennsylvania home and received, as he recounts in the opening

chapter to Slaughterhouse Five, a rather chilly reception from his friend’s wife, Mary, who believed the author would gloss over the soldiers’ youth and write something that could be turned into a movie starring Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. “She freed me,” Vonnegut reflected, “to write about what infants we really were: 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that was a problem.

-Although Vonnegut considered the book a failure – it had to be, he said, as it “was written by a pillar of salt” – the public disagreed. Written during the height of the Vietnam War, Slaughterhouse Five’s compassion in the face of terrible slaughter struck a nerve with an American populace trying to come to grips with the war and a society that seemed to be, at best, headed for major changes.

(KURT VONNEGUT)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Kurt Vonnegut Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2015.

"Kurt Vonnegut." Indiana Historical Society. Indiana's Storyteller, n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2015.

"A Brief Biography of Kurt Vonnegut." Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.