2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
Perhaps today it is difficult to meet a person who would not know Vonnegut Kurt. And even if you have not read any of his books, you have probably heard quotes from his works more than once. Today we invite you to take a closer look at the life and work of this great American writer.
Kurt Vonnegut: biography
The future world famous writer comes from a family of German immigrants. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in 1922, November 11, in the American city of Indianapolis, which in the future often became the scene of his works. His father was one of the co-owners of a construction company, and his mother came from a we althy family of a millionaire American brewer. Kurt had older brother and sister - Bernard and Alice.
During the Great Depression, the financial situation of the Vonnegut family was greatly shaken. At the same time, Kurt's mother began to show the first symptoms of severe mental illness, which eventually led to her committing suicide. This happened in 1944. This factshocked young Kurt very much. After leaving school, Vonnegut Jr., at the insistence of his father, entered the chemistry department at Cornell University. However, this subject was of little interest to him, and the boy gave all his time to work in the student newspaper.
World War II
After the United States announced its participation in World War II, the young man volunteered for the US Army. As a result, he was transferred to the University of Tennessee, where he studied mechanical engineering. After that, Vonnegut Kurt went to the front. At the end of 1944, the young man, along with other American soldiers, was captured by the Germans. He was sent to a labor camp in Dresden, Germany. At night and during air raids on the city, Vonnegut and other prisoners were locked in an abandoned slaughterhouse. Kurt was lucky to survive the air raids on Dresden in early 1945. Then the whole city was almost completely destroyed. According to Kurt himself, who participated in the analysis of the rubble, at least 250 thousand people died. The young man's experiences associated with this horrific catastrophe were reflected in several of his works in the future. Among them, a special place is occupied by the book "Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade", which brought the writer real fame.
Post-war life
After the end of the war, Kurt Vonnegut returned to the US and enrolled in graduate school (anthropology) at the University of Chicago. In parallel with his studies, he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Bureau of News. In 1947the young man made an attempt to defend his master's thesis on the topic of the unstable relationship between good and evil in fairy tales. However, this work was unanimously rejected by all teachers. As a result, the department of the Chicago faculty nevertheless awarded Vonnegut the title of master. But this happened only in 1971. The reason for this was the writer's novel "Cat's Cradle" (1963).
After failing his first master's thesis, Kurt Vonnegut travels to Schenectady, where he joins the public relations department of the large American corporation General Electric.
Kurt Vonnegut: books, writing career
Events experienced by Vonnegut in his youth formed the basis of his first work. It was a fantasy novel called Utopia 14. In his book, published in 1952, the author draws a very unsightly picture of the future, when all the work on earth is done by machines, and man is unnecessary. Vonnegut's subsequent works were also written in the science fiction genre: Titan's Sirens (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963). The real world recognition came to Kurt thanks to a work based on real events called "Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade", written in 1969. The book is dedicated to the bombing of German Dresden by British and United States aircraft in February 1945, during which the city was almost completely destroyed, and a significant part of its population died.
Also Peru KurtaVonnegut owns such wonderful books as "Farce, or Down with Loneliness", "Small Do Not Miss", "Recidivist", "Galapagos", "Bluebeard", "Timequake" and others.
Kurt Vonnegut quotes
The most famous sayings of this man include the following phrases: “No matter what scientists work on, they still come out with weapons”, “Even though people are stupid and cruel, look what a beautiful day!”, “Maturity is the ability to realize the limit of one's capabilities.”
Last years of life
Kurt Vonnegut was very passionate about his writing and did not stop working, even reaching a very advanced age. This famous American author died on April 11, 2007. The cause of death was the consequences of a head injury, which the 84-year-old writer received as a result of a fall. Despite the fact that this great humanist and thinker has been dead for several years, Kurt Vonnegut, whose books still stir the minds of readers around the world, will forever remain in the memory and hearts of millions of people from all over the world.
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