Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies
His death was reported by his wife, the author and photographer Jill Krementz, who said he had been hospitalized after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.
Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.” (Read more...)
By A. O. SCOTT
"A New York friendship," Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, "is a friendship with a person you have met at least once. If you have met a person only once, and you are a New Yorker, you are entitled to say, whenever that person's name comes up in conversation, 'Yes - so-and-so is a friend of mine.' " I am therefore proud to call Vonnegut my friend. Well, almost. One evening some years ago, at a literary party at an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I was sitting at one end of a living-room couch intently studying a bowl of mixed nuts when I became aware that someone had sat down on the other end. The walrus moustache, the curly salt-and-pepper hair, the crumpled pack of Pall Malls in the shirt pocket - I instantly recognized him from the line-drawn self-portraits that accompany some of his books. Not surprisingly, I found myself too star-struck to say a word. A while later, I was scolded for my timidity by a friend of mine who is also a friend of Vonnegut's, something I had just missed the chance at becoming. "He was sitting right there next to you for 15 minutes and you completely ignored him," she said. I stammered that I hadn't been able to think of anything to say. "How about, 'I like your work'?" she wondered. (Read more...)
NOW's David Brancaccio interviews literary icon Kurt Vonnegut about his life and the current state of American democracy. With his classic wit, the legendary author of CAT'S CRADLE and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE comments on how American democracy works and delivers some choice words for our parties, our system, and our president. Vonnegut's latest book, a collection of nonfiction entitled A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY, is a bestseller.
