Vonnegut Reissues: Does His Work Hold Up?

From The Los Angeles Times:

Vonnegut started publishing in the early 1950s and, in 1969, came out with "Slaughterhouse-Five," recently reissued by Dial Press -- along with "Sirens of Titan," "Mother Night" and "Galapagos," all $15 -- a miracle book that both distilled everything its writer knew and caught the wave of America's damaged, deranged Vietnam-era mood. The worldwide splash made by "Slaughterhouse-Five" turned Vonnegut into a wealthy celebrity, and thereafter it came to seem that everything he'd written before had been a kind of preparation, while what he wrote after merely drifted in that book's wake. That judgment is true in a way and yet totally unfair -- a very Vonnegutian formulation -- although "Slaughterhouse-Five" does remain central.

[Paperback Writers: Slaughter and Rubble]

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

I read Harrison Bergeron in high school. I thought it was a great story, but I also didn't have time to read a great author back then. I was forced to read the classics, old tomes I understood but about which I could have cared less.

But, during my first trip Out West, Spring of 2002, I read Breakfast of Champions on the way back. It was not the first book I ever read which changed the way I thought about life, but it was probably the most important in my overall development.



Kurt Vonnegut passed away last night in Manhattan. He was 84. On another, similar yet unrelated, note, I entered a writing contest for the first time in my career. I only hope that it was not that fact which ultimately killed Mr. Vonnegut.

I think he would have appreciated that joke. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.