Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut ( ; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. He published 14 novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works over fifty-plus years; further collections have been published since his death.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau.

Vonnegut published his first novel, ''Player Piano'', in 1952. It received positive reviews yet sold poorly. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several well regarded novels including two—''The Sirens of Titan'' (1959) and ''Cat's Cradle'' (1963)—that were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection, ''Welcome to the Monkey House,'' in 1968.

Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' (1969). Its anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amid the Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. It rose to the top of ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list and made Vonnegut famous. Later in his career, Vonnegut published autobiographical essays and short-story collections such as ''Fates Worse Than Death'' (1991) and ''A Man Without a Country'' (2005). He has been hailed for his dark humor commentary on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, ''Armageddon in Retrospect'', in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published ''Complete Stories'', a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction.