Kurt Vonnegut, Famous Hoosier
Categories: In the News , Movies & Books , Local Interest
The whole world is a little dimmer now. Kurt Vonnegut passed away at the age of 84.
Indianapolis, his birth city, is celebrating 2007 as The Year of Vonnegut. The Indianapolis Marion County Public Library has lots of events planned, too, and the One Book One City selection, announced just day before yesterday, is Slaughterhouse Five. Now this will all sadly be In Memoriam.
Slaughterhouse Five was written a long time after his experiences in WWII as a prisoner of war in Germany. He was actually there in the bombing of Dresden, and he survived it with other POWs in an old slaughterhouse cellar, which is why I feel this event is so poignant in the book.
I miss him already. Chances are, he doesn't miss us much, being up there talking to Newton and Shakespeare and all those folks he was looking forward to meeting.
My mom attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis and worked on the school newspaper at the same time as Vonnegut. She didn't know him well, but even in a huge high school like Shortridge she remembered him. He was a talented writer even then, way back in 1939. He published his first story in 1950 in a magazine, which set him on his path for life.
Probably the most well known of his books is Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, made into a movie in 1972. A few other books by Kurt Vonnegut, in no particular order, include the following:
There are so many more: plays, including Happy Birthday Wanda June; collections of short works such as Welcome to the Monkey House; and non-fiction collections of essays including Fates Worse than Death: A Biographical Collage of the 1980s and A Man Without a Country. His books are still in print, and some are also available as audio books on CD and digital audio books for download.
USA Today printed a wonderful quote from him, regarding Libraries: "The America I loved still exists in the front desks of public libraries." That makes me feel good.
1 Comment
Hey Mary Ann, I knew Vonnegut at Shortridge in the 40s. His locker was next to mine and I frequently left notes in it for him to write editorials for the Echo. Wonder who your mom is???