Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, the youngest child of the architect Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and Edith Lieber Vonnegut. He wrote for his high-school newspaper and then for the Cornell Daily Sun while studying biochemistry at Cornell, which he left in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. Captured in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, he was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden. He survived the Allied firebombing of the city in February 1945 in an underground meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse, and afterward he and other prisoners were put to work recovering the dead. After the war he married Jane Cox, studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, and worked as a reporter and as a publicist for General Electric before writing full time. In 1958, after his sister Alice and her husband died, he and Jane took in three of their sons. His darkly comic, satirical novels include Player Piano (1952), Cat's Cradle (1963) and the antiwar Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). His outlook was largely fatalistic and humanist. He died in New York in 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: A humanist rather than a religious believer, he was honorary president of the American Humanist Association from 1992, when he succeeded Isaac Asimov, until his death in 2007. Source: American Humanist Association, April 20, 2009 announcement