Kurt Vonnegut
Short summary:
Biography. Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indi-. ana, on November 11, 1922, ...... Bluebeard is Kurt Vonnegut’s most extensive exami- ...
Long summary:
Kurt Vonnegut Born: Indianapolis, Indiana November 11, 1922 Short-story writer and novelist Vonnegut is noted for his sa- tiric humor, social commentary, frequent use of science fiction, and increasingly postmodern techniques. Biography Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indi- ana, on November 11, 1922, the son of Kurt and Edith Vonnegut. He was the youngest of three chil- dren. His ancestors had come from Germany in 1855. They were prosperous, originally as brewers and merchants, down to Kurt’s grandfather and father, who were both architects, and they were prominent in the heavily German Indianapolis so- ciety. Then World War I left a residue of anti- German feeling in the United States and prohibi- tions on the use of the German language, dimming the family’s pride and its cultural heritage. Prohibi- tion brought an end to the brewing business, and the Great Depression of the 1930’s left Vonnegut’s father without work for essentially the rest of his life. Vonnegut writes frequently of the Depression and repeatedly portrays people who, like his father, are left feeling purposeless by loss of occupation. At Shortridge High School, Vonnegut wrote for the Shortridge Daily Echo. The rigor of writing daily to deadlines helped shape his habits as a writer. In 1940, he went to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in biochemistry and wrote for the Cornell Sun. By January, 1943, Vonnegut was a private in the United States Army. In May of that year, his mother committed suicide, an event of which he would write as having left him a “legacy of suicide.” Soon thereafter, the Army sent him to Eu- rope, where he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. There he experi- enced the event that forms the basis of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the firebombing that virtually destroyed Dresden on the night of Febru- ary 13, 1945. After discharge from the Army, Vonnegut un- dertook graduate studies in a ...
Source: salempress.com
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Kurt Vonnegut, Biography. Kurt Vonnegut was born in
Indianapolis, Indi-. ana, on November 11,
1922, ...... Bluebeard is Kurt
Vonnegut’s most extensive exami- ...,
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