God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died yesterday at age 84. He was, without question, my favorite contemporary author.

Vonnegut is most famous for writing his 1969 anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-5, in which he recounted the WWII Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany (an event Vonnegut personally witnessed and survived). Like many other students, my high school summer reading list included this novel. At the time, also like many other high school students, I failed to appreciate what I was forced to read. Five years would pass before I would re-read the book on my own.

Slaughterhouse-5 cast a long shadow over everything Vonnegut wrote before or since, and as a result his other novels were perhaps not read as much as they should have been. Although not considered among his best work, Vonnegut’s Bluebeard is the book I have recommended more times and to more people than I can possibly count. I buy several copies to give as Christmas presents each year, and I number it first among the few books that have literally changed the way I think about life. This month at Angrypiper.com I will review Bluebeard and what it means to me, which is a review I have long put off for fear of uncontrollably gushing forth an embarrassing amount of praise.

Vonnegut’s black humor and masterful prose place him firmly in the ranks of the world’s greatest satirists, men like Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and James Thurber. He is one of only a handful of authors who have literally made me laugh out loud. Although he wrote less and less towards the end of his life, he never lost his sense of humor. In a nineties Discover card commercial, for example, Vonnegut claimed his credit card statement contained purchases of books he himself wrote. The commercial ended with a shot of him silently reading his work, then erupting in laughter.

In 2005’s A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut offered this criticism of the current political administration: “The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

Rest in peace, Kurt. Even at age 84, you died too soon.

So it goes.