Biography of Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born to third-generation German American parents in the city of Indianapolis, year 1922, November 11th. While at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, Vonnegut was heavily involved with the school’s daily newspaper, the first and only daily high school newspaper in our nation. During his time at Cornell University, Vonnegut became the school paper’s senior editor. World War II then began, and so Vonnegut joined our nation’s armed forces. Mother’s Day came in 1944, and during this time while Vonnegut was home on leave, his mother committed suicide. Later on while in the army, Vonnegut was sent to Europe where he was captured and made into a POW by Germans. He witnessed the 1945 bombing of Dresden, which was later said to have killed more civilians than the bombing of Hiroshima.

After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. In 1958, Vonnegut’s sister died of cancer, which was seemingly timely with her husband’s death-by-train-crash only hours earlier. Vonnegut adopted three of his sister’s four children, adding to his three biological ones at the time. Vonnegut is given a total of seven. In 1965 Vonnegut was the teacher of the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, and had separated himself from his family in order to support them. This may have contributed to him and his wife’s estrangement in 1970. Nine years later they made their divorce official to the state. Vonnegut promptly afterward married photographer Jill Krementz. In 1982, the new couple adopted a young daughter, bringing Kurt Vonnegut’s sum of children to an impressive seven.

Although Kurt Vonnegut has always been a reader’s favorite, his works did not become cr...

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...ldly, level. The central conflict of Any Reasonable Offer is instead one that focuses itself upon one man. Harrison Bergeron features a central and obvious antagonist, where after I finished reading Any Reasonable Offer I found the Peckhams to not be very antagonistic but instead clever. Lastly, Harrison Bergeron can be seen as speaking out against a totalitarian civilization. Any Reasonable Offer does not speak out against any types of dangerous government control. It is instead an interesting sequence of events from one man’s life.

It may have taken him twenty years, but Vonnegut was finally able to make his name known to the world of literature. Today he is regarded as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. His career goes to show that becoming an accomplished author isn’t always easy or immediate, few authors are able to quickly jump to the top.