Kurt Vonnegut would have turned 100 today -- his war novels are relevant as ever
Kurt Vonnegut was disappointed in America. "I'm sorry that America isn't a greater success than it is," he told me in 1991. "Because we're so wealthy and we really could have done almost anything. And we've done so very little in comparison to what we might have done in creating an ideal society."
Vonnegut, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, would have turned 100 today. He was born in Indianapolis on Nov. 11, 1922, Armistice Day. The late author wrote satirical and darkly humorous novels that won him a cult-like following with the youth culture of the 1960s — but his work remains relevant today.
Vonnegut wrote novels about the irrationality of governments and the senseless destruction of war. His work was informed by his experience in World War II when he was a 22-year-old soldier captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.
In 1987, he told me he was determined to write about war without romanticizing it. "My own feeling is that Civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that," he said. "Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war — romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again."
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https://www.npr.org/2022/11/11/1135127289/kurt-vonnegut-slaughterhouse-five-cats-cradle?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_source=facebook.com
I keep hoping to see Billy Pilgrim somewhere again. I raise my glass to the best American author we have seen since Mark Twain.
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