From the Dust Jacket:
This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence displays all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared this author to readers worldwide.
Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud.
Vonnegut’s unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels—from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing “atomic” bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (“Knopf, for example, might give John Updike’s contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion’s contract in return.”) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and open-hearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon.
ON A JOB HE HAD AS A YOUNG MAN:
“Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors.”
TO A RELATIVE WHO CALLS HIM A “GREAT LITERARY FIGURE”:
“I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.”
ON BORIS, HIS CHESS-PLAYING ROBOT:
“Really—he is one smart, mean son of a bitch.”
TO NORMAN MAILER:
“I am cuter than you are.”
Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote.
About the Author:
Dan Wakefield
first befriended Kurt Vonnegut in 1963. Like Vonnegut, he was born and raised in Indianapolis. He is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include the bestselling Going All the Way and the memoirs New York in the Fifties and Returning: A Spiritual Journey.
Compiler’s Note:
Of Vonnegut’s four adopted children, three were his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams, of whom Vonnegut and his first wife, Jane, took custody (but never formally adopted) when both their mother, Alice (Vonnegut’s older sister), and father, James Carmalt Adams, died within a 48-hour period in September 1958 (James in a tragic commuter rail accident in New Jersey and Alice from cancer); the fourth, Lily, was adopted as an infant in 1982 by Vonnegut and his second wife, Jill Krementz, a photographer and author of the book How It Feels to Be Adopted (1982, Knopf). (The fourth and youngest of the Adamses’ sons, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father’s in Birmingham, Alabama, as an infant.) Lily is a singer, actress, and the producer of the YouTube series “The Most Popular Girls in School.”
See also,
And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (2011, Henry Holt).
