Kurt Vonnegut

His older siblings were Bernard (born 1914) and Alice (born 1917).

The Liebers' brewery was closed in 1921 after the advent of prohibition.

When the Great Depression hit, few people could afford to build, causing clients at Kurt Sr.'s architectural firm to become scarce.

Vonnegut's brother and sister had finished their primary and secondary educations in private schools, but Vonnegut was placed in a public school called Public School No. 43 (now the James Whitcomb Riley School).

He was bothered by the Great Depression, and both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune.

His father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a "dreamy artist".

His mother became depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and abusive.

She labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said that she expressed hatred for her husband that was "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid".

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels.

In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and his wife Edith (née Lieber).

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army.

As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee.

He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge.

He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned.

After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children.

Vonnegut adopted three of his sister's sons after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.

He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago, while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952.

The novel received positive reviews but was not commercially successful at the time.

In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, two of which—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year.

He published a short-story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968.

His breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive.

Slaughterhouse-Five rose to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and made Vonnegut famous.

He gave speeches, lectures, and commencement addresses; he received awards and honors.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published autobiographical essays and short-story collections, such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005).

After his death, he was hailed as one of the most important contemporary writers and a dark humor commentator on American society.

His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008.

In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction, including five previously unpublished stories.

Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield.

Scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.

He had descended from German immigrants who settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; his paternal great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company.

His father and grandfather Bernard were architects; the architecture firm under Kurt Sr. designed such buildings as Das Deutsche Haus (now called "The Athenæum"), the Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company, and the Fletcher Trust Building.

Vonnegut's mother was born into Indianapolis high society, as her family, the Liebers, were among the wealthiest in the city with their fortune deriving from ownership of a successful brewery.

Both of Vonnegut's parents were fluent German speakers, but the ill feeling toward Germany during and after World War I caused them to abandon German culture in order to show their American patriotism.

Thus, they did not teach Vonnegut to speak German or introduce him to German literature and traditions, leaving him feeling "ignorant and rootless".

Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper during the first decade of his life, for raising him and giving him values; he said, "she gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to me", and "was as great an influence on me as anybody".

He described her as "humane and wise" and added that "the compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs" came from her.

The financial security and social prosperity that the Vonneguts had once enjoyed were destroyed in a matter of years.