Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. 1922–

PERSONAL: Born November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, IN; son of Kurt (an architect) and Edith Sophia (Lieber) Vonnegut; married Jane Marie Cox, September 1, 1945 (divorced, 1979); married Jill Krementz (a photographer), November, 1979; children: (first marriage) Mark, Edith, Nanette; (adopted deceased sister's children) James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; (second marriage) Lili (adopted). Education: Attended Cornell University, 1940–42, and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), 1943; attended University of Chicago, 1945–47, M.A., 1971. Hobbies and other interests: Painting, wood carving, welded sculpture.

ADDRESSES: Home—Northampton, MA. Agent—Donald C. Farber, Esq., 460 Park Ave., 11th Floor, New York, NY 10022-1987.

CAREER: Cornell Daily Sun, Ithaca, NY, editor, 1941–42; Chicago City News Bureau, Chicago, IL, police reporter, 1947; General Electric Co., Schenectady, NY, employed in public relations, 1947–50; freelance writer, 1950–. Teacher at Hopefield School, Sandwich, MA, beginning 1965; lecturer at University of Iowa Writers Workshop, 1965–67, and at Harvard University, 1970–71; Distinguished Professor of English Prose, City College of the City University of New York, 1973–74; faculty member at Smith College, 2001–. Speaker, National Coalition against Censorship, 1986. Appeared in cameo film roles in Back to School, Orion, 1986, Mother Night, Fine Line, 1996, and Breakfast of Champions, Buena Vista, 1999. Military service: U.S. Army, Infantry, 1942–45; was POW; received Purple Heart.

MEMBER: Authors League of America, PEN (American Center; vice president, 1974–), National Institute of Arts and Letters, Delta Upsilon, Barnstable Yacht Club, Barnstable Comedy Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellow, 1967; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1970; Litt.D., Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1974; Literary Lion award, New York Public Library, 1981; Eugene V. Debs Award, Eugene V. Debs Foundation, 1981, for public service; Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1985, for Displaced Person; Bronze Medallion, Guild Hall, 1986; named New York's State Author by the New York State Writers' Institute, 2001.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Player Piano, Scribner (New York, NY), 1952, published as Utopia 14, Bantam (New York, NY), 1954, published under original title with new preface, Holt (New York, NY), 1966.

The Sirens of Titan, Dell (New York, NY), 1959.

Mother Night, Gold Medal Books (New York, NY), 1961.

Cat's Cradle (also see below), Holt (New York, NY), 1963.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (also see below), Holt (New York, NY), 1965.

Slaughterhouse Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod (and Smoking Too Much) Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the Elbe, a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale: This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1969, twenty-fifth anniversary edition, 1994.

Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (also see below), Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1973.

Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1976.

Jailbird, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1979.

Deadeye Dick, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1982.

Galapagos, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1985.

Bluebeard, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1987.

Hocus Pocus, Putnam (New York, NY), 1990.

Three Complete Novels (contains Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Cat's Cradle), Wings (New York, NY), 1995.

Timequake, Putnam (New York, NY), 1997.

SHORT FICTION

Canary in a Cathouse, Fawcett (New York, NY), 1961.

Welcome to the Monkey House: A Collection of Short Works, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1968.

Bagombo Snuff Box, Putnam (New York, NY), 1999.

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Seven Stories (New York, NY), 1999.

PLAYS

Penelope (produced on Cape Cod, MA, 1960), revised version published as Happy Birthday, Wanda June (produced off-Broadway, 1970; also see below), Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1971, revised edition, Samuel French (New York, NY), 1971.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June (screenplay; based on Vonnegut's play), Columbia, 1971.

Between Time and Timbuktu; or, Prometheus Five: A Space Fantasy (television play; produced on National Educational Television Network, 1972), Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1972.

Miss Temptation, edited by David Coperman, Dramatic Publishing Company (Woodstock, IL), 1993.

Also author of Something Borrowed, 1958; The Very First Christmas Morning, 1962; EPICAC, 1963; My Name Is Everyone, 1964; and Fortitude, 1968.

OTHER

Wampeters, Foma, and Grandfalloons (Opinions) (essays), Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Ivan Chermayeff) Sun, Moon, Star (juvenile), Harper (New York, NY), 1980.

Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte (New York, NY), 1981.

Nothing Is Lost Save Honor: Two Essays (contains "The Worst Addiction of Them All" and "Fates Worse than Death: Lecture at St. John the Divine, New York City, May 23, 1982"), Toothpaste Press (West Branch, IA), 1984.

Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (autobiography), Putnam (New York, NY), 1991.

(Author of foreword) Leeds, Marc, The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1995.

Contributor to books, including Bob and Ray: A Retrospective, June 15-July 10, 1982, Museum of Broadcasting (New York, NY), 1982; W.E. Block, and M.A. Walker, editors, Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity: An Economic and Social Perspective, Fraser Institute (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1982; Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing (with Lee Stringer), Seven Stories Press (New York, NY), 1999; and Modern Fiction and Art, University of Kentucky Art Museum (Lexington, KT), 1999. Contributor of fiction to numerous publications, including Cornell Daily Sun, Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, Playboy, and Saturday Evening Post.

ADAPTATIONS: Slaughterhouse Five was adapted for film by Stephen Geller, Universal, 1972; "Who Am I This Time" (short story) was adapted for film, Rubicon Films, 1982; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was adapted for the stage by Howard Ashman and produced by Vonnegut's daughter, Edith, 1979; Slapstick was adapted for film as Slapstick of Another Kind, Paul-Serendipity, 1984; "D. P." (short story) was adapted for television as Displaced Person, Hemisphere, 1985; Mother Night was adapted for film by Robert B. Weide, Fine Line, 1996; Breakfast of Champions was adapted for film by director Alan Rudolph, Buena Vista, 1999. Several of Vonnegut's novels have been adapted as audio books.

SIDELIGHTS: Lauded as one of the most respected American novelists of the twentieth century, Kurt Vonnegut was virtually ignored by critics at the beginning of his writing career. In Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary Fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz observed that "Vonnegut's rise to eminence coincides precisely with the shift in taste which brought a whole new reading public—and eventually critical appreciation—to the works of Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, and others. Ten years and several books their elder, Vonnegut … was well prepared to be the senior member of the new disruptive group, and the first of its numbers to be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize. By 1973, when Breakfast of Champions appeared,… there was little doubt that a fiction widely scorned only six years before was now a dominant mode in serious contemporary literature."

While such early works as Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan were at first categorized as science fiction, Vonnegut's books go far beyond the realm of most pure SF. As Ernest W. Ranly explained in Commonweal: "Von-negut at times adds fantasy to his stories, whereas pure sci-fi permits only what is possible within a given scientific hypothesis. Vonnegut adds humor, a wild black humor, while most sci-fi is serious to the point of boredom. Vonnegut, generally, adds a distinctive sense and literary class. And, finally, Vonnegut seems pre-occupied with genuine human questions, about war, peace, technology, human happiness. He is even bitterly anti-machine, anti-technology, anti-science."

Mother Night, Vonnegut's third novel, is the story of an American playwright living in Germany at the outbreak of World War II who is persuaded by the Allies to remain in Germany as a spy while posing as a radio propagandist. After the war he fades into obscurity in the United States until, with his wartime cover still intact, he is kidnaped by Israeli agents to stand trial for his crime. Michael Wood remarked in New York Review of Books, "What is impressive about Mother Night is its extraordinary tone which allows Vonnegut to be very funny without being crass or unfeeling." Mother Night, the critic added, "is not an attempt to defeat an enemy by ridicule, but an attempt to contemplate horror by means of laughter, because laughter, of all our inappropriate responses to total, terminal horror, seems the least inappropriate, the least inhuman."

Mother Night is Vonnegut's first novel to employ a first-person narration, and is also the first in which technology and the future play no significant part. For this reason it is seen by many as a transitional novel between the author's early and more mature work. Perhaps most obvious, in comparison with Vonnegut's first two novels, Mother Night relies very little on time shifts, resulting in a more unified or "conventional" book. In his Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Peter J. Reed described it as "Vonnegut's most traditional novel in form. Paradoxically, perhaps, that also accounts for the relative weaknesses of the book. For Mother Night lacks some of the excitement and verve of The Sirens of Titan, for example, and it is sometimes less likely to carry its reader along than that earlier, more wandering fantasy."

In 1963's Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut penned his most autobiographical work up to that point. The Hoenikker family of the novel closely parallels Vonnegut's own family, consisting of an elder son who is a scientist, a tall middle daughter, and a younger son who joins Delta Upsilon. The narrator is again a writer who, in this case, is working on a book called The Day the World Ended, about the bombing of Hiroshima. For decades after its publication Cat's Cradle consistently appeared on high school and college reading lists; Reed said that it might be the most widely read of Vonnegut's novels among young people. He explained that "to 'the counter-culture' it should appeal as a book which counters almost every aspect of the culture of our society. To a generation which delights in the 'put on,' parody and artifice, often as the most meaningful expressions of deeply held convictions in a world which they see as prone to distortion, Cat's Cradle's play with language, symbol and artifice should find accord."

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine introduces a theme that crops up repeatedly in the later novels and which is often considered to be the essence of all of Vonnegut's writing. It is expressed by the main character, Eliot Rosewater, in the motto "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." John R. May commented in a Twentieth-Century Literature review that it is the author's "most positive and humane work…. We may not be able, Vonnegut is saying, to undo the harm that has been done, but we can certainly love, simply because there are people, those who have been made useless by our past stupidity and greed, our previous crimes against our brothers. And if that seems insane, then the better the world for such folly." Book Week contributor Daniel Talbot wrote: "It's a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. that he has covered such a large territory of human follies in so short a book…. The net effect is at once explosively funny and agonizing."

In Slaughterhouse Five; or, the Children's Crusade Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a young infantry scout who is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse, where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, these prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been leveled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Vonnegut, who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished—more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes summed up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in New York Times Book Review, writing: "Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them." The reviewer concluded that "Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread."

The enduring popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with issues that have remained vital to Americans who came of age in the late 1960s: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, saw larger reasons for the book's success, noting that "Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age."

After the publication of Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut entered a period of depression during which he vowed, at one point, never to write another novel. He concentrated, instead, on lecturing, teaching, and finishing a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, that he had begun several years earlier. The play, which ran Off-Broadway from October, 1970 to March, 1971, received mixed reviews. Newsweek's Jack Kroll wrote that "almost every time an American novelist writes a play he shows up most of our thumb-tongued playwrights, who lack the melody of mind, the wit, dash and accuracy of Saul Bellow and Bruce Jay Friedman. And the same thing must be said of the writing in Happy Birthday, Wanda June … Vonnegut's dialogue is not only fast and funny, with a palpable taste and crackle, but it also means something. And his comic sense is a superior one; Wanda June has as many laughs as anything by Neil Simon." On the other hand, in New Republic Stanley Kauffmann called the play "a disaster, full of callow wit, rheumatic invention, and dormitory profundity…. The height of its imagination is exemplified by a scene in Heaven between a golden-haired little girl and a Nazi Gauleiter in which they discuss the way Jesus plays shuffleboard." Despite some negative reviews, Happy Birthday, Wanda June was adapted as a feature film in 1971, with the screenplay by Vonnegut.

Breakfast of Champions marked the end of Vonnegut's depression and his return to the novel form; in honor of this event, he subtitles his work Goodbye Blue Monday. In Breakfast of Champions, as in most of Vonnegut's writing, there are very clear autobiographical tendencies. In this novel, however, the author seems to be even more wrapped up in his characters than usual. He appears as Philboyd Sludge, the author of a book which focuses on Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer (Vonnegut once ran a Saab dealership) who goes berserk after reading a novel by Kilgore Trout, who also represents Vonnegut. Toward the end of the book, Vonnegut arranges a meeting between himself and Trout, in which he cuts the character loose forever; by this time the previously unsuccessful Trout has become rich and famous and is finally able to stand on his own.

Catastrophe comes easily in 1982's Deadeye Dick. The title character's father saves the life of a starving artist, the young Adolph Hitler, when the two are in school together; the narrator, Rudy Waltz, gains his cruel nickname at age twelve when a shot he fires from his father's rifle accidentally kills a pregnant woman; and later, a neutron bomb detonates, either by accident, or by the government's covert design, in Waltz's home town, killing everyone, but leaving the machines and buildings unharmed. Interspersed with these horrors are recipes, provided by Rudy, who has gone on to become a chef and copartner with his brother in a restaurant in Haiti. Writing in New York Times Book Review, Benjamin De Mott noted that throughout "the grand old Vonnegutian comedy of causelessness still holds center stage…. Why does the child of a gun safety specialist, using a rifle from his father's collection, emerge as a double murderer? A tough question. Why do human beings take satisfaction in creating a neutron bomb that destroys 'only' human beings, not their accouterments? Another toughie. Why should grief-struck Rudy Waltz, headed for a presumably moving moment at his parents' graveside, allow his train of thought to light on a certain cookie, whereupon … instead of grief we're provided with a recipe for almond macaroons?"

If catastrophe comes more easily to man than courtesy and decency, man's large brain is to blame, Vonnegut asserts in his next novel. Galapagos "brings Vonnegut's lifelong belief in the imperfectibility of human nature to its logical conclusion," observed a London Times reviewer. The novel recounts the evolution of man over thousands of years. Narrated by the spectral remains of Vietnam vet Leon Trout, Galapagos follows the experiences of a group of tourists who are shipwrecked in the islands where nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin formulated the notion of progressive adaptation; over time, their oversized brains diminish, sexual interests atrophy, and their hands become flippers, all to the benefit of the race and the ecosystem. "This will eliminate war, starvation, and nuclear terror—that is, many of the things Mr. Vonnegut likes to complain about in his novels," remarked New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani. But for all the seriousness of its message, the book contains sufficient humor to make it satisfying as "a well-crafted comic strip," Kakutani added.

Although it takes place in the near future, the text of 1990's Hocus Pocus, like many Vonnegut novels, ranges freely through the much of the twentieth century. As Vonnegut's protagonist Eugene Debs Hartke describes it, America in 2001 is "a thoroughly looted bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV." Like the central char-acters in Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five, Hartke is a man incarcerated. His story ranges from West Point to Vietnam—he is the last American soldier to leave—from his job as physics instructor at a college for dyslexics—he is dismissed for his pessimism—to his job at a prison run for profit by the Japanese. Hartke is unjustly accused of masterminding a prison break and ends up in jail himself. Along the way some familiar Vonnegut standbys—the Tralfamadorians from Sirens of Titan, and the SF writer Kilgore Trout from Breakfast of Champions—turn up, and as in other novels, Vonnegut freely peppers the text with quotes from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

The novel Timequake appeared in 1997, though Vonnegut had completed it several years earlier. Having decided the newly completed novel was in fact "pointless," its author went back to the drawing board and reworked its best parts into a digressive stew, which he then declared as his final literary utterance. The germ of a plot remains: At the turn of the millennium, the world falls victim to a wrinkle in space-time that forces everyone on earth to relive the 1990s. This provides a jumping-off point for Vonnegut's ruminations about moral decay, mortality, and the state of Western culture at the close of the twentieth century. A few familiar devices do remain, such as the presence of Kilgore Trout and the employment of a Zen-like repetitive phrase. "Hi ho" and "So it goes" had been refrains in earlier novels; this time the refrain is "tingaling."

Reviews have split their verdict on Timequake's significance, though few reserved comment on Vonnegut's claim that he was washed up. R.Z. Sheppard in a Time review derided Vonnegut for "seeking sympathy" from book reviewers by announcing Timequake as his final novel. "Having a novelist's free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride," Sheppard observed, going on to express his annoyance at the novel's lack of story and Vonnegut's "familiar tone of weary bemusement." In Newsweek, Brad Stone called the author "notoriously skilled in this business of lowering reader expectations," but then went on to praise the novel lavishly. Timequake, Stone wrote, is Vonnegut's "funniest book since Breakfast of Champions."

In 1999 a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction was released under the title Bagombo Snuff Box. The book contains twenty-three stories penned during the 1950s and 1960s and published in Colliers and Saturday Evening Post. A critic for Publishers Weekly wrote that the stories "will be of most interest to completists and scholars" since the finer of his stories from that period had already been published in the 1968 collection Welcome to the Monkey House. Early in 2000, another collection was released, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, which is composed of rewritten pieces Vonnegut originally created for radio station WNYC. In the stories he visits with notable dead people, among them Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Eugene V. Debs, and John Brown. Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman called these pieces "warmhearted, caustic, and wise."

While Vonnegut's short and long fiction remains couchedly candid in its reflection of his personal views on many subjects, his essays and other works of nonfiction are even more so. He has published several collections of essays, interviews, and speeches, including Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage in 1981 and Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s, a similar mix to Palm Sunday, published a decade later. In Fates Worse than Death collected essays and speeches are interwoven with memoir and parenthetical commentary written especially for the volume. Subject matter ranges from the broadly political—Western imperialism and America's wargreed—to the painfully personal—Vonnegut's own prisoner-of-war experiences and bouts with mental illness. Douglas Anderson described the collection in New York Times Book Review as "scarily funny" and felt that "it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart." In Times Literary Supplement James Woods concluded that the "more Vonnegut writes the more American he seems—a kind of de-solemnized Emerson, at once arguer, doubter, sermonizer and gossip."

Vonnegut's status as a master of contemporary fiction is built only partly on the strength of his themes. Writing in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Robert Group noted that the author "offers a mixture of wistful humanism and cynical existentialism that implies a way of dealing with modern realities completely different from that of most American writers. In the tradition of [Laurence] Sterne and [Henry] Fielding, he uses wit and wisdom to show that though man may live in a purposeless universe full of self-seeking manipulations, there is hope for something better…. Like Trout or Vonnegut one must cry out against absurdity, even if one is ignored. Vonnegut creates a vision so preposterous that indignation might provide the basis for change—while laughter allows one to cope with the moment."

Looking back on his career and synthesizing his views about writing, Vonnegut told Joel Bleifuss of In These Times: "Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

American Writers, Scribner's (New York, NY), 1981.

Bloom, Harold, editor, Kurt Vonnegut, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2000.

Broer, Lawrence R., editor, Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, revised edition, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 1994.

Chernuchin, Michael, editor, Vonnegut Talks!, Pylon Press (Forest Hills, NY), 1977.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 12, 1980, Volume 22, 1982, Volume 60, 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume 8: Twentieth-Century American Science Fiction Writers, Part 2, 1981.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Volume 3, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Giannone, Richard, Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels, Kennikat Press (Port Washington, NY), 1977.

Kazin, Alfred, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Donald L. Lawler, editors, Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1977.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer, editors, The Vonnegut Statement: Original Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1973.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, Kurt Vonnegut, Methuen (New York, NY), 1982.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1975.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1985.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change, Iowa State University Press (Ames, IA), 1980.

Krementz, Jill, editor, Happy Birthday, Kurt Vonnegut: A Festschrift for Kurt Vonnegut on His Sixtieth Birthday, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1982.

Lundquist, James, Kurt Vonnegut, Ungar (New York, NY), 1977.

Morse, Donald E., The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American, Praeger (Westport, CT), 2003.

Plimpton, George, editor, Writers at Work: The "Paris Review" Interviews, sixth series, Penguin (New York, NY), 1984.

Reed, Peter J., Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Warner Books (New York, NY), 1972.

Schatt, Stanley, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Twayne (Boston, MA), 1976.

Tomedi, John, Kurt Vonnegut, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.

Vonnegut, Kurt, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine, Holt (New York, NY), 1965.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Hocus Pocus, Putnam (New York, NY), 1990.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Bagombo Snuff Box, p. 1989; December 1, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, p. 661.

Book Week, April 11, 1965.

Commonweal, September 16, 1966; June 6, 1969; November 27, 1970; May 7, 1971; December 7, 1973.

Detroit News, June 18, 1972; September 16, 1979; October 3, 1982; November 10, 1985; January 5, 1986.

Film Comment, November-December, 1985.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), March 17, 1984; February 8, 1986; October 17, 1987.

International Fiction Review, summer, 1980.

Library Journal, September 1, 1999, Joshua Cohen, review of Bagombo Snuff Box, p. 236.

Life, April 9, 1965; August 16, 1968; September 12, 1969; November 20, 1970.

Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1983.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 23, 1979; October 31, 1982; March 3, 1984; April 18, 1984; September 29, 1985; September 2, 1990, pp. 1, 10.

Modern Fiction Studies, spring, 1973; summer, 1975; winter, 1980–81.

Nation, September 23, 1968; June 9, 1969; September 15, 1979; March 21, 1981; November 13, 1982.

National Review, September 28, 1973; November 26, 1976; November 23, 1979; December 10, 1982.

New Republic, August 18, 1952; October 8, 1966; April 26, 1969; November 7, 1970; June 12, 1971; May 12, 1973; September 28, 1973; June 1, 1974; July 5, 1974; September 25, 1976; November 26, 1976.

Newsweek, August 19, 1968; March 3, 1969; April 14, 1969; October 19, 1970; December 20, 1971; May 14, 1973; October 1, 1979; September 29, 1997, Brad Stone, review of Timequake, p. 78.

New Yorker, August 16, 1952; May 15, 1965; May 17, 1969; October 17, 1970; October 25, 1976; November 8, 1982.

New York Review of Books, July 2, 1970; May 31, 1973; November 25, 1976; November 22, 1979.

New York Times, August 19, 1968; September 13, 1969; October 6, 1970; October 18, 1970; May 27, 1971; May 13, 1973; October 3, 1975; September 7, 1979; September 24, 1979; October 15, 1979; March 27, 1981; November 5, 1982; February 4, 1983; February 17, 1983; September 25, 1985, Michiko Kakutani, review of Galagapos, p. 21; January 27, 1987; April 4, 1987.

New York Times Book Review, June 2, 1963; April 25, 1965; August 6, 1967; September 1, 1968; April 6, 1969; February 4, 1973; May 13, 1973; October 3, 1976; September 9, 1979; March 15, 1981; October 17, 1982, Benjamin De Mott, review of Deadeye Dick, p. 1; October 6, 1985; October 18, 1987, p. 12; September 9, 1990, p. 12; September 15, 1991, Douglas Anderson, review of Fates Worse than Death, p. 26; November 1, 1992, p. 32.

New York Times Magazine, January 24, 1971.

People, October 19, 1987.

Progressive, August, 1981.

Publishers Weekly, October 25, 1985; January 31, 1986; August 9, 1999, review of Bagombo Snuff Box, p. 342; October 4, 1999, review of audio version of Bagombo Snuff Box, p. 36; December 13, 1999, review of God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, p. 64.

South Atlantic Quarterly, winter, 1979.

Studies in Modern Fiction, Volume 12, number 3, 1971; Volume 14, number 3, 1973; Volume 15, number 2, 1973; Volume 17, number 1, 1975; Volume 18, number 3, 1977; Volume 26, number 2, 1985.

Time, August 30, 1968; April 11, 1969; June 29, 1970; June 3, 1974; October 25, 1976; September 10, 1979; October 25, 1982; October 21, 1985; September 28, 1987, p. 68; September 3, 1990, p. 73; September 29, 1997, R.Z. Sheppard, review of Timequake, p. 95; February 14, 2000, p. 25.

Times (London, England), July 8, 1981; February 17, 1983; May 17, 1986, review of Galapagos; May 30, 1987.

Times Literary Supplement, November 11, 1965; December 12, 1968; July 17, 1969; November 5, 1976; December 7, 1979; June 19, 1981; September 26, 1980; February 25, 1983; November 8, 1985, Thomas M. Disch, review of Galapagos; October 26, 1990, p. 1146; November 15, 1991, James Woods, review of Fates Worse than Death, p. 8; October 15, 1999, Michael Newton, review of Bagombo Snuff Box, p. 25.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), September 27, 1987, p. 1; August 19, 1990, p. 6; September 1, 1991, p. 4; November 24, 1991, p. 8; September 6, 1992, p. 2.

Twentieth-Century Literature, January, 1972, John R. May, review of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine.

U.S. News & World Report, February 14, 2000, "The Kindness of Strangers," p. 12.

Village Voice, February 22, 1983.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1981.

Washington Post, October 12, 1970; May 13, 1973; May 15, 1981; February 2, 1982.

Washington Post Book World, March 8, 1981; October 17, 1982; September 22, 1985; October 4, 1987; August 19, 1990, pp. 1-2; October 21, 1990, p. 15.

Western Humanities Review, summer, 1974.

World Literature Today, winter, 1981.

ONLINE

In These Times, http://www.inthesetimes.com/ (January 27, 2003), Joel Bliefuss, "Kurt Vonnegut vs. the!&#!@."

Kurt Vonnegut Home Page, http://www.vonnegut.com/ (April 15, 2004).