Kurt Vonnegut

The absolute master of deadpan humor. A giant of American twentieth-century literature who talked the talk and walked the walk. Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels and plays noted for their pessimism and satire which highlighted the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization.

After studying at Cornell, he served in the US Army Air Wing in WWII before being captured by the Germans and then surviving the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. He would use this experience in an attempt to recreate in fictional form his Dresden experience in Slaughterhouse Five (also called The Children's Crusade) in 1969, pointing out the cruelty and destructiveness of war down through the centuries and thus became a legend amongst the US intelligentsia and an anti-war icon. The book became one of the infamous 'banned' books in many public schools alongside other iconoclastic works, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, that didn't fit with the whitewashing of the past being taught to American students.

His first novel, Player Piano visualizes a completely mechanical society whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scientists and workers in a New York factory town. The Sirens of Titan is a quasi-science fiction novel in which the entire history of the human race is considered an accident attendant on an alien planet's search for a spare part for a space ship.In Cat's Cradle, some Caribbean islanders adopt a new religion consisting of harmless trivialities in response to an unforeseen scientific discovery that eventually destroys all life on earth.

Vonnegut's use of science fiction and fantasy as tools rather than as genre definition opened up paths to countless authors. My favorite work of his that I have found more quotes from in my notebooks than any other is Mother Night. Phrasing from many of his works has consciously or unconsciously entered my personal lexicon, much like so many aspects of his influence, 'So it goes.' It has all been welcomed.

Kurt, we miss you and from multiple generations of American students, I thank you.